For a reasonable conversation about this, I think it is important to distinguish the difference between personal/social writing and technical writing. For the former, pretty much anything goes—bring on the emoticons, excessive punctuation, texting abbreviations, relaxed grammar, etc. For the latter, there are well established writing guidelines and most of the NGA articles that I've read have adhered to them, but recently two articles apparently slid past the editing process. There is no place for emoticons or breathless punctuation in informative, instructive articles published in a professional newsletter that has thousands of readers worldwide and that presents itself as a legitimate, authoritative source of gardening information.
However, the fault here lies not with the authors of these articles but with the publisher, who should have edited them for format or required revision. Letters of complaint (which I agree are legitimate) might have been more appropriately and diplomatically directed to NGA management by private mail.
