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LETTERS: Business Critique

Dear Editor,

I am writing you in response to the article about the economy in City Paper issue number 113, published October 2008. I am a businessman, currently working in the textiles industry, with a master's degree in economics.

I recently had the opportunity to travel to Estonia for a meeting with our Baltic headquarters, and picked up the City Paper to find out what Tallinn had to offer in terms of entertainment. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the lead story in your publication was an overview of the economic crisis in the Baltic States. My surprise turned sour, however, upon reading Mr. Viberg's article. Not only was the article factually misleading, it was poorly written. By the third sentence, the journalist had already misspelled the name of one of the most prominent publication in the U.K. (which Mr. Viberg referred to as "The Gardian").

The article went on to completely butcher an analysis of the current world economic crisis, and did not even mention the Baltic States until well into the second page. By then he had already lost my trust in his ability to competently comment on anything economic. For lack of anything better to do, I continued to read. Thankfully, Mr. Viberg soon digressed and began listing quotes of local economists and politicians. I won't bother commenting on the remainder of the article, but let it be said that I was not impressed. Nevertheless, despite this bloated hiccup of an economy article, I enjoyed the issue.

Many of the lighter article were quite interesting, particularly the bit on theater in Tallinn, which I have since discovered is highly developed and extremely enjoyable. The article on healers was interesting, if rather odd in itself. In the future, I would advise you to either stick to light articles, or at the very least employ an economic writer who knows what they are talking about.

Jaap Hauer