June 2009 – Funk Library

Seven new research reports from ACE conference . These reports were presented recently to the Research Special Interest Group during an Association of Communication Excellence (ACE) conference in Des Moines, Iowa. You can read the abstracts here. Check with the authors about gaining access to full-text reports.

Katie M. Abrams and Courtney A. Meyers, ” Comparison of persuasive message factors and frames in animal agriculture communication campaigns on the Web ”

Karen J. Cannon and Tracy Irani, ” Framing foot and mouth disease coverage of the 2001 and 2007 outbreaks in the United Kingdom ”

Leslie D. Edgar and Tracy Rutherford, ” Comparing previous research in agricultural communications to the National Research Agenda: Agricultural Education and Communication, 2007-2010 ”

Kelsey Hall and Emily Rhoades, ” Influence of subjective norms and communication preferences on grain farmers’ attitudes toward organic and non-organic farming ”

Lisa Hightower, Hannah Carter, Rochelle Strickland and Karen Cannon, ” Communicating agricultural leadership through mobile technology ”

Courtney A. Meyers and Tracy Irani, ” The agriculture angle: effect of framing agricultural biotechnology messages on attitudes toward argument quality ”

Judith McIntosh White and Tracy Rutherford, ” Impact of reporter beat assignment on source selection: implications for journalism education ”

Rural broadband access is not enough. Current discussions about broadband service for rural areas need to move beyond the focus on access, according to a commentary we added recently to the ACDC collection. Joe Dales of Farms.com Professional Services suggested these goals be included:

User computer training
Internet training
Development of relevant broadband business applications

“It can be argued that there is little economic value to society in developing a global leading edge broadband delivery network if its primary use is to download games or videos for rural children.”

Citation: Rural broadband – an important platform
Posted at http://www.professional.farms.com/cms/en/RuralBroadband.aspx

How to cover rural-urban relations . A new professional development feature on the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) web site offers skills and approaches reporters can use to cover rural-urban issues. This is the fourth in a series about rural-urban communicating. Authors Jim Evans, University of Illinois, and Owen Roberts, University of Guelph, described three types of rural-urban media coverage:

Filling gaps in rural-urban understanding
Covering rural-urban interests in conflict
Covering rural-urban inequities and imbalances

Then they identified skills, tools and perspectives reporters can use with each.

Posted at http://www.ifaj.org > Breaking News section

Part 4. Preparing agricultural journalists/communicators for the 21st Century.

Here are suggestions from Bob Kern, past president and Professional Award recipient of the Association for Communication Excellence, about how to design an undergraduate agricultural journalism/communications program for the 21st Century:

“Writing is the primary communications skill – and will remain so for the foreseeable future.”
“Within agriculture, schooling should include input/output economics, policy-development process, and U.S. production and marketing within world agriculture.”
“Communications teaching should be based on applicable communications theory, emphasizing that which is research-based.”

Read more of Dr. Kern’s suggestions and reasons he offers for emphasizing them.

Thanks to all who contributed to this series. We also invite your thoughts and suggestions about how to prepare agricultural journalists/communicators for the 21st Century.

Karlie

Welcome to a new ACDC staff associate .

We extend a special welcome to Karlie Elliott who joined the ACDC staff during May following her graduation from the agricultural communications program here, with a news-editorial emphasis. She is helping search for documents, review them and process them into the collection. This fall she will enter the masters degree program in the Department of Advertising here at the University of Illinois.

Karlie brings a great combination of skills and interests to the Center. Farm-raised in east-central Illinois, she enjoys and appreciates the full range of activities related to food and agriculture, internationally. Her undergraduate program has involved study in Latin America and Europe. She has gained communications and leadership experience through internships with Caterpillar Inc. and the Office of Communications, U. S. Department of Agriculture. On campus, she has served as president of the College of ACES Council and of the Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (ACT) student organization, among other activities. As a junior she was recognized as Robert Harrison Outstanding Junior Leader of the College of ACES. Recently she received the Warren K. Wessels Achievement Award as outstanding senior in the College.

Plenty more mid-year communicator activities

July 31-August 4, 2009
2009 Congress of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) in conjunction with the Agricultural Media Summit in Fort Worth, Texas USA.
Information: www.ifaj.org

August 1-5, 2009
“Saddle up, catch the cowboy spirit.” Agricultural Media Summit in Fort Worth, Texas USA. Joint meeting of Livestock Publications Council (LPC), American Agricultural Editors’ Association (AAEA), International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ), Livestock Publications Council (LPC) and the National Association of Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (ACT).
Information: www.agmediasummit.org

August 23-27, 2009
“Worldwide trends in open access to agricultural information.” Agricultural libraries discussion group at the World Library and Information Congress, Milan, Italy.
Information: http://www.ifla.org/annual-conference/ifla75/call-agricultural-en.htm

August 26-28, 2009
“Information and communication technologies for sustainable development.” 4th World IT Forum in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Information: http://iaald.blogspot.com/2008/11/world-it-forum-2009.html

August 31-September 4, 2009
Sixth International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Held in conjunction with the International Congress on Medical Librarianship.
Information: http://iaald.blogspot.com/2008/06/sixth-international-conference-of.html

Best regards and good searching. Please pass along your reactions, suggestions and ideas for the Agricultural Communications Documentation Center. Feel free to invite our help as you search for information. And please suggest (or send) agricultural communications documents we might add to this unique collection. We welcome them in hard copy (sent to Ag Com Documentation Center, 510 LIAC, 1101 S. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801) or in electronic format sent to docctr@library.uiuc.edu .

Get in touch with us when you see interesting items in the ACDC collection and can’t gain full-text access through information in the citation, or through online searching. We will help you gain access.

It’s more than link rot. How about data rot? Thanks to Paul Hixson for introducing that broader question in response to our ACDC News item about the ephemeral nature of live links to agricultural information on the Internet. He alerted us to two recent reports from David Pogue, one in the New York Times and one on CBS Television:

Pogue’s reports examine two aspects of data rot. One involves problems with the medium on which the information is stored (e.g., storage conditions). The other involves obsolescence of storage platforms (e.g., wire recorders and 8-track tape players).

What’s to be done? “…it’s something you have to take responsibility for yourself. No one is going to do it for you,” suggested one of Pogue’s resource specialists.

Farmer-to-farmer video – better than workshops in sparking innovation. A 2009 report in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability concluded that “farmer-to-farmer video has great potential to enhance sustainable agriculture by encouraging local innovations.” Researchers reported these findings from a study among 200 women farmers in central Benin:

About 92% of those who viewed farmer-to-farmer learning videos and took part in hands-on training workshops developed creative solutions to rice processing based on improved parboiling methods.
72% of those who learned only through video did so.
19% of those who learned through workshops did so.

Thanks to Catherine Mgendi of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) for calling our attention to this report. Other materials in the ACDC collection confirm that implications extend beyond the settings of studies such as this.

Read a summary at: http://www.warda.org/warda/newsrel-videopower-jun09.asp

Food shoppers bombarded and bamboozled. We recently added to the ACDC collection a research summary that raises a caution flag about information overload. Joanne Denney-finch, chief executive of IGD, United Kingdom, reported: “Shoppers tell us they are being bombarded by a variety of issues, day-in, day-out from a variety of sources…and they say that too much information bamboozles them.”

According to reported research findings,” only 21% are very confident that they understand all the information they receive about food, while 19% don’t mind how much information they get – because they usually ignore it anyway.”

Citation: Information overload is industry opportunity
Posted at http://www.igd.com/index.asp?id=1&fid=6&sid=25&tid=90&folid=0&cid=203

Part 3. Preparing agricultural journalists/communicators for the 21st Century.

Here are suggestions from Douglas Starr, professor of agricultural journalism at Texas A&M University, about how to design an undergraduate agricultural journalism/communications program for the 21st Century:

“Today’s agricultural journalism/communications students need a Collegiate dictionary, a grammar book and an Associated Press Stylebook, and they need to learn how to use each…”
Know, be aware of and be knowledgeable about officials and news sources in various fields of agriculture.
“I strongly advocate [education in communication theory and research] because it will stand them in good stead regardless of where their careers take them.”
“With the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, Ag Comm students should know how to write a second-day story because the Web page gets the first story.”

Read more of Professor Starr’s suggestions and reasons he offers for emphasizing them.

Students produce winning rural-urban videos . You can view three honored videos that college students produced recently to clarify how our food gets from the farm to the dinner table. These videos topped the Alpharma Ag Student Video Contest sponsored by Alpharma Animal Health:

“OatS” Produced by a team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
“Today’s Agriculture” Produced by a team from the University of Florida
“Beef: Our Priority” Produced by a team from the University of Arizona

Posted at: http://www.meetwhatyoueat.com/winners.aspx

Lots of mid-year communicator activities

June 25-27, 2009
“Free rein in the Big Easy.” Annual seminar of the American Horse Publishers (AHP) organization in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Information: www.americanhorsepubs.org/programs/seminars/index.asp

Yes, a new winner in agricultural fiction. We have been delinquent in reviewing results of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. You may recall it as an international literary parody contest hosted by the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University. The goal of the contest is “childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”

So get ready. Here is the runner-up entry in the “Vile Puns” category. Michael L. VanBlaricum of Santa Barbara, California, entered it:

“The Jones family held their annual family reunion on Easter going through over six dozen spiral-cut, hickory-smoked hams and several bottles of a fine Australian shiraz, before Farmer Jones, the head of the family, took the leavings back to Manor Farm to slop Napoleon and his other champion hogs but the seventy-six ham bones fed the pig’s tirade.”

Month: June 2009

ACDC News – Issue 09-12

ACDC News – Issue 09-11

News Archive