Large numbers of people were upset something like that would run in their paper.' 'In a community like ours we are very close to the audience. 'After the blowback, we felt somebody had to be held accountable,' Engstrom said. Fergus Falls is a lakes-country city of about 13,000. The Daily Journal has a print circulation of about 5,000. Let's debate the issues, not make personal attacks on people.'Įngstrom said the decision to drop Linda was made after the Journal received push-back through emails, phone calls, Facebook messages and face-to-face contact with readers. The list goes on, but you get the picture. There are some viewpoints that are out of bounds. 'Not only did this offend many of our readers, it offended us,' the editorial said. The Journal announced it was dropping Linda's column in an editorial. The column ended with this line: 'If airlines need to make more money, they should sell tickets by the pound.' Linda also worried about the man stealing his peanuts and lamented how when his seat mate went to the back of the plane to use the restroom, Linda wishes he would've followed to 'watch if that worked.' And when a 300-plus guy has you effectively pinned in and you can't even run for it, when they grimace at you, your first thought is: 'Oh, man. If he didn't weigh 300-plus pounds, then I don't weigh 165 pounds,' Linda wrote. 'Guess who my seat partners were? The one on my left was so big, I couldn't get the arm rest down. Linda referred to larger people as 'fat.' The column in question was headlined 'Taking notice of the size of people in today's world' and recounted an experience Linda had recently in which he sat next to a large man on an airplane. 'If we tell our kids to not bully, how can we as adults allow bullying?' Bullying is not acceptable,' said Tim Engstrom, the publisher and editor of the Daily Journal. Here is the column that got writer booted from Fergus Falls newspaper His column, which ran once a week for 30 years in the Otter Tail County, Minn., newspaper, was dumped last week. Linda, at least in the eyes of the Daily Journal, reached the point of no return by making fun of an unnamed overweight person he sat next to on an airplane. You just hope the good days outweigh the bad and you don't go down a rabbit hole from which you can't return. You write enough of these things and you're going to have bad days. It was mean-spirited, but we've all been there, too. Was not particularly entertaining, funny or insightful, but every columnist has been there. The column that got Alan Linda yanked as an unpaid contributor to the Fergus Falls Daily Journal

Fergus falls daily journal alan linda