I think of it as paying text message rates for selective and convenient access to information that was developed at some cost to someone else, and which is of some measurable value to me.

In your letter, you repeatedly imply that the best reason for reading a newspaper is vanity. You demand that consumers of local news content be readers but not paying customers, and you offer no solutions to this conundrum. You condescend to know their business better than they do.

I get it, the world has changed, media has changed, and small community newspapers are not changing fast enough to keep you on as a customer. And yet, there are far better ways to engage your community about this issue than to gloat over the fact you receive their goods and services for free.

Worst of all, you represent yourself as a librarian and professor, and by posting on the ALA TechSource blog, as a voice for the American Library Association. You make it plain that you are no friend of information producers unless they give up everything they own, free and online, and in saying so, you misrepresent us all.

Your blog has a broad readership. In person, you can enthrall an audience. In a relatively short career, you have already inspired a lot of people. People are listening. What do you hope they will do, after reading your letter?