I find the academy/real world debate fascinating, but I think the 
professors have the wrong idea about journalists. It is as if they -- the 
tenured professors, anyway -- were looking for a 1995 Burgundy and were
disappointed they didn't find it in the  all-night 7-11 store. (I don't
claim infallibility on any subject, but I feel qualified to talk about
newspaper reporting since I have been doing it for 40 years. For a
reference, I wrote the full-page obituary of Pound in The New York Times.)
        Writers for newspapers are hurried, harrassed by editors,
constrained by space. But I've never met any who have time when doing an
article to think about whether they work for the ruling classes, the common
man, intellectuals or what have you. You just get it out as best you can, 
1,000 words an hour in desperate circumstances.
        Surely there is room in the world for all sorts of readers of Pound
--  novices and adepts, poets and annotators. I take hope from the fact
that in this entire debate the most sensible person has been not a scholar,
not a journalist, not a poet, but a computer programmer.
 
Cheers.
Paul Montgomery
Lausanne, Switzerland