Berg: Times, Don't Do It!

Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger calls for the New York Times to reconsider its plan to eliminate the stand-alone Metro section.

This is a city with eight million residents, after all. Given that I see fewer and fewer people on subways reading the Times, surely it harms company profits when you lose local circulation wars to far inferior publications, which provide more coverage to the type of local news that city residents crave to read.

Berg mentions the Times' often excellent reporting on the City Room blog - where the paper runs most of its local political and social coverage - but argues that this is little more than relegating the local beat to where fewer people will read it, and abdicating coverage to the tabloids.

Read Berg's letter here.