Month: May 2010

International excellence in agricultural broadcasting . The International Federation of Agricultural Journalists recently presented the inaugural IFAJ Star Prize for Agricultural Broadcasting to Kerry Staight for her television feature aired on ABC-TV. Based in South Australia, this Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist did an exceptional job of addressing the sensitive issue of succession planning by farm families. She drew upon the insights and experiences of families and consultants that cooperated with her.

You can view this Star Prize program, “All in the Family,” here .

Top radio honor. Click here to listen to the award-winning radio entry by Sarina Locke, an ABC rural journalist based in Canberra, Australia. “Surprising developments in West Timor, Indonesia” is the title of this program. You will find that it features an engaging topic, a strong human touch and especially effective use of functional sounds.

Powerful portfolio of water photos. World Water Day on March 22 inspired the Boston Globe to arrange for an online set of 43 remarkable images “all of water, here at home – Earth.” The National Geographic Society shared some of them.

You can review them here .

Digitizing agricultural weeklies . Something approaching 15,000 issues of 12 U. S. agricultural weeklies have been digitized to date by the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library here at the University of Illinois. As a group, they involve a time span between 1841 and 1939 – and the project continues.

Anyone with access to the Internet can browse these farm papers by date or search by keyword across articles, advertisements and photo captions, according to an article we are adding to the ACDC collection. Access to the repository is free. “The University of Illinois Library houses one of the world’s premier collections of agricultural newspapers,” the article reported. “The collection is valuable not only for students and scholars researching the history of agriculture or agricultural economics, communications and technology, but also for historians of education, historical sociologists, environmental historians, and social and cultural historians.”

You can visit the “Farm, Field and Fireside” repository h ere .

Why care about small town newspapers? Professor Terry Besser of Iowa State University offered nearly a dozen reasons in a commentary we added recently to the ACDC collection. For example, he argued that small town papers can:

• Reflect, affirm and help build a positive community atmosphere
• Help local citizens define what it means to be a member of the local community
• Remind communities of their history
• Report the important events in common peoples’ lives
• Identify local needs, highlight local talent and recognize local achievements
• Reveal deviant and unacceptable behavior as well as exemplary behavior in the community
• Create forums for discussion of local policies and issues; encourage participation
• Dispel rumors

“Let people chuckle about the kind of news covered,” he concluded. “Perhaps [laughter] is another contribution of small town papers in community life.”

You can read the commentary here , via The Hometown Weekly.

Chinese farmers calling for more useful information. That is the theme of feedback from farmers who took part in a recent training course. Writing in the Rural21 journal, Wang Dehai of China Agricultural University reported challenges such as:

• Information too theoretical and not adapted to producers’ local conditions
• Extension personnel – few in number, limited qualifications, overloaded with administrative work
• Commercial trainers – accessible, but seen as holding conflict of interest

“Training need assessment is a fundamental tool to improve rural training to suit Chinese farmers’ needs and change the trainers’ mentality, perceptions and capabilities,” the author concluded.

Read this brief journal article here .

Condolences to the families of Hal Taylor and Don Gomery. The recent passing of these two professional agricultural journalists/communicators holds special meaning for us in the Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, as for many others.

• Hal was a long-time mentor, associate and friend through his activities as an effective, highly respected communications leader in the U. S. Department of Agriculture. During retirement he contributed valued documents to the ACDC collection, including materials from the influential National Project in Agricultural Communications (NPAC) during the 1950s and 1960s. Learn more about Hal’s career here .

• Don associated with the Center during the past five years through his service on the executive committee of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists. As chair of the IFAJ Professional Development and Education Committee, he helped establish a productive IFAJ/ACDC partnership. We valued his friendship and, with many others, respected his farm journalism career in the UK and 26-year service as honorary secretary of the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Great Britain. Learn more about Don’s career here .

Communicator activities approaching

June 14-17, 2010
“Meet us in St. Louis.” Annual conference of the Association of Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences (ACE) in St. Louis, Missouri USA.
Information: http://www.aceweb.org/meetings/ace2010.html

June 22-26, 2010
60th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Singapore.
Information: http://www.icahdq.org

July 24-28, 2010
“Rolling on the River, AMS Style.” Ag Media Summit in St. Paul, Minnesota USA.
Information: http://www.agmediasummit.com

Yes, talkative hair . We close this issue of ACDC News with another “Sentence of the Week” from the University of Chicago Writing Program:

Head teacher Nigel Pott said the school had been trying to resolve the issue of Chloe’s hair since before Christmas. Despite liaising with Chloe and her parents, her hair had stayed a pink colour, Mr. Pott said.

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.

A “hole rent in the fabric of the community.” That’s how Marc Haddock of the Deseret News described the demise of five community weekly newspapers in Utah during early 2009.

“The history of Utah’s cities and towns – as it has been written week after week in the pages of their hometown papers – captures the day-to-day life of the community in more depth and detail than could ever be compiled in a single book. It is an unparalleled record of births and deaths, weddings and funerals, major news events and small-town happenings. Anyone who has subscribed to one of Utah’s more than 50 weekly or biweekly newspapers will recognize the hole that will be rent in the fabric of the community when these papers cease to exist.”

You can read the article here .

Media training boosts confidence of producers. Evidence came recently from a study reported by agricultural communications researchers at Texas Tech University. Results of a one-day, interactive media workshop among Texas cotton producers revealed significant positive change between the pre-test and post-test in their:

• attitude and perception toward the news media
• confidence about presenting an accurate view of an agriculture-related topic
• comfort level in being interviewed by media

You can read this research report here .

Development journalism – giving soul to media. “As issues facing the developing world grow ever more complex and difficult, the task of good journalism should be to throw light on them.” A recent feature by Sue George in The Guardian ( UK) addressed this challenge and included some “how to.”

• Development journalism is especially complex – and under threat – because “international development is complex, slow, non-prescriptive and uncertain. It requires the reporter to appreciate and explore the interplay of diverse realms such as health, education, environment, governance, local and national economics, and culture.”
• It is not “an entirely uncritical publicity vehicle for any organization or institution.”
• It is not “making people into victims by treating them without dignity or sensationalizing their lives.”
• “We are looking at big policies affecting developing countries,” a cited reporter explained, “and looking at how this relates on the ground to those who expect to be benefiting.” Another cited reporter put it this way: Development journalism “gives soul to media, it gives it a human face.”

You can read this article here .
Also, here is another perspective on development journalism that we added recently to the ACDC collection.

New Chickens magazine hits the newsstands. “How much more basic can you get than providing your family with food from right outside your backdoor?” asked Roger Sipe, editor of the new Chickens magazine, in a recent news release. We received word of it via the AgriMarketing weekly update. Published by BowTie, Inc., this periodical will focus on the common backyard chicken. It will feature products and services, breed profiles, poultry keeping tips and other information for the novice or experienced poultry keeper.

You can read the news release here .

Remarkable international portfolio of water photos. World Water Day on March 22 inspired the Boston Globe to arrange for an online set of 43 remarkable photos “all of water, here at home – Earth.” The National Geographic Society shared some of them.

You can review them here .

Here’s another response when friends ask, “Do you talk to animals?” You can affirm it – and explain that animals also are talking to you, using social media.

“Even cows are tweeting now,” announced reporter Sharon Hill in a recent issue of the Windsor Star ( Ontario, Canada). She was reporting on an innovative experiment by the Critical Media Lab, University of Waterloo. Staff members teamed up with the Buttermine Farms in Brant, Ontario, to make this possible. How?

• The farm uses a volunteer milking system, in which cows “volunteer” when they wish to be milked
• A robotic milker does the milking
• Each cow wears a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag that coordinates her activities with a computer
• Staff members prepared a Twitter profile for 12 cows and created a “voice” for each.

So, for example, a Holstein cow named Frosty Lace tweets online:

“Thought I would sneak in for some good feed. No way.”
“All this milking makes me hungry. Ate 1254 kg.”
“Fastest teat is my left back which milked in 2:50 secs”

Want to read some of the reports about this project?

“About ‘teat tweet'”
“Tweets reveal an udder world”
“Teats and tweets”

Communicator activities approaching

May 4, 2010
Midwest Regional Design and Writing Workshop for members of the American Agricultural Editors’ Association (AAEA), Livestock Publications Council (LPC) and Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (ACT). Takes place in West Des Moines, Iowa USA.
Information: Jennifer Bremer at jbremer@hpj.com

May 5-6, 2010
“Desert Discoveries.” Annual meeting of the Turf and Ornamental Communicators Association (TOCA) in Tucson, Arizona USA.
Information: http://www.toca.org

June 14-17, 2010
“Meet us in St. Louis.” Annual conference of the Association of Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences (ACE) in St. Louis, Missouri USA.
Information: http://www.aceweb.org/meetings/ace2010.html

July 24-28, 2010
“Rolling on the River, AMS Style.” Ag Media Summit in St. Paul, Minnesota USA.
Information: www.agmediasummit.com

Insight from Pootwattle, the Virtual Academic ™. We close this issue of ACDC news with a key communications insight. It falls outside our agricultural focus, but seems profound enough for us to think you will appreciate it. And we pass it along with thanks to the University of Chicago Writing Program for use of its random sentence generator. Virtual Academic uses words and phrases pervading academic journals these days. Here it is:

The sublimation of narrative communication is homologous with the teleology of unsituated knowledge.

Yes, you can create your own impressive insights through the Virtual Academic .

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