Field staff coming to HQ for annual briefing

Capital Press news staff members from four states will be gathering for the next two days at our Salem, Ore., headquarters for our annual spring meetings.

Our field staff members from California, Idaho and Washington come to town each year for some annual training. We'll be discussing all sort of stuff on Thursday and Friday, everything from using numbers in reporting, to photography, to filing stories for multiple platforms, i.e., writing and producing photos for print and online.

So, there may be some delays with our online posts to the Capital Press website tomorrow, as all of us news folks will be in meetings all day. And you may see some Twitter posts sent out during the meeting that may differ from our usual offering (perhaps complaining about the lack of the right kind of doughnuts or the quality of the coffee, who knows).

Part of my mission, as it always seems to be during these meetings, will be to encourage our staff to embrace the tools the technology and the Internet offer us as researchers, reporters and editors of agriculture news and information.

What would you want reporters and writers for the Capital Press to know if you had a chance to get a message to them?

Would you like to see them blogging? Would you like to see them on Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Would you like to see more staff posts throughout the week to our website? More picture? More videos online?

What would you tell the reporters and editors of the Capital Press if you had the chance?

You can post comments here, send them to me on Twitter @capitalpress or e-mail them to me and I will pass them along to our staff.

Capital Press expands mobile ag news delivery options

It's hard to carry a laptop computer everywhere you go. And a wireless hotspot can be hard to find in the middle of a pasture, field or circle. So, it may not always be possible to check the Capital Press website for news updates or to check your e-mail for the latest e-newsletter from www.capitalpress.com. But now you have another option for ways to stay in touch.

Text message alerts for big, breaking ag news are now available from the Capital Press. If you sign up at access.capitalpress.com, we can sent the big news developments, when they happen, right to your cell phone.

We know you are busy people and don't plan to send out lots of alerts. Our current plan is to sent out maybe 1 or 2 alerts a week, depending on the news. We figure people who want daily updates can sign up for our daily e-mail update. And if you want the top stories of the week, we have an e-mail newsletter that goes out once a week for that too. But sometimes news breaks after the newsletter has already been sent. And sometimes news is just too big to wait. Those are the times we will plan to use the SMS text alerts.

If you have specific needs or wishes for information you would like us to deliver to your cell phone, let us know by posting a comment here or sending an e-mail to us and we may be able to expand our SMS offerings in the future. And if your cellphone provider isn't listed, let us know that too and we will try to add your provider as quickly as possible.

And if you have a cell phone with a web browser, you can always read the latest headlines, featured classified ads and week's top stories at www.capitalpress.com/mobile.