The RAM Truck Super Bowl ad featuring legendary radio broadcaster Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” tribute has been called a huge success. With more than 10 million views online in less than a week after the ad first aired, RAM Truck’s goal was reached, resulting in a $1 million donation to the National FFA Organization’s hunger relief efforts, according to RAM Truck.
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The Capital Press has a booth again this year at the Red Bluff Bull and Gelding Sale, one of many events throughout the year at which our paper has a presence.
Manning the booth this year is our newest ad representative, Josef Laredo, who works out of Woodland and has Northern California as his territory. He can be reached at 916-203-8869 or at jlaredo@capitalpress.com.
I have a bit of a fondness for the Capital Press booth at the bull sale, having stopped there three years ago when I was working in the Red Bluff bureau for the Redding Record Searchlight. I had read the Capital Press before, but the person at the booth then told me how it worked -- that reporters throughout the West work out of their homes and cover their regions. When the Capital Press' Northern California field reporting job came open later that year, I applied.
So if you're at the bull sale, stop by for souvenirs, subscription deals and conversation. Or just come by and grab a paper.
It was one year ago this month that we relaunched the Capital Press website with a new look and a ton of new features.
We still think of it as our "new" website, but as of Aug. 1, it is now 1 year old.
The site continues to grow and evolve as we find new options we want to provide for our visitors and based on suggestions we hear from visitors to the site.
While you can find all of the ads and stories you would find in print editions of the Capital Press on our website, it is, in many ways, a very different information service. Our print editions only come out once a week, but we update the website at least five days a week. Some of the things you will find on our website are only available there.
It is a work in progress. We hope you like the progress so far and find some, or all, of the expanded features helpful. But we would be surprised if anyone is taking advantage of all of the features. There are so many, sometimes even those of us that work for the Capital Press lose track of some of the features our website.
The website is designed so you can get news and advertising in a manner that best suits your needs. If you haven't checked out the site, here are some of key features of the site:
Search stories and ads at the same time — From the search box in the top right corner of every page you can type in what you want to find and search across all of our site's current stories and ads to find your search word or search terms.
Searchable archives — If you are looking for story from a past edition of Capital Press, you can search our online archive of material dating back to 2002.
Download PDF copies of the print editions — If you want to see how a story looked in print, or want a color copy of a page that appeared in our paper, but someone recycled your copy, subscribers can download a PDF of an entire edition and print out any pages they want.
A la carte options for non subscribers — If you can't have a subscription to the Capital Press, but want access to all the features of our website, you can buy access by the day — or longer — right from your computer.
Mobile-enabled pages — Smart phones and other mobile devices make it easy to access websites when you are away from the computer, but they are not always convenient to read on a small screen. If you want to view web stories from pages designed specifically for use on mobile devices, you can check out our mobile website:
E-newsletters — We offer multiple options for electronic newsletters that can be sent direct to your e-mail on your computer or mobile phone. We have a daily newsletter, a weekly newsletter of our top stories, California and Idaho newsletters, a dairy newsletter and one for livestock news. All you have to do is register on our site, and tell us which newsletters you want sent to your e-mail. Pick one, pick a couple or pick them all, that's your choice.
SMS text alerts for breaking news — When big news breaks, we can send you a text alert with a link to the story delivered right to your cell phone. You can sign up for this service by registering in the website. And don't worry. We won't bombard you with text messages. We average less than one SMS alert a week.
Multiple RSS feeds — If you want to monitor ag news on specific topics or based on geography, you can monitor a selection of RSS feeds. Click here for the full list of feeds we offer.
User forums — This is perhaps the most underutilized area of our site, but one which offer great potential. Registered users of our site can post question and comments for each other, share information or ask questions of us here at the Capital Press. It's your forum. You can make it whatever you want it to be.
Online classified ad placement — As always, you can call us at the Capital Press and we can you build a line ad to sell a piece of farm equipment, tools or anything else you are trying to sell. But if you want to to build the ad yourself, you can place your line ad online through our online ad placement system.
State-specific weather — On our California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Montana pages, you can find state-specific weather information, including weather radar maps to see what Mother Nature may have in store for you.
RSS feeds with headlines from our sister papers — Capital Press is part of a family of newspapers, and we can give you access to some of the top news headlines from our sister papers throughout the Pacific Northwest at this link. Through our site we can give you a peak at what's happening in other areas where East Oregonian Publishing Company has newspapers.
Social media integration — We know that everyone wants to get their news specifically from a news website. So if you prefer to monitor developments through a Facebook or Twitter account, you can like up with us on those services. You can also keep an eye on what people on Twitter are saying on agriculture topics on our home page and other pages on our website's home page.
Put your events on our calendar — Have an upcoming event you want featured on the Capital Press online calendar? You can post your calendar listing directly to our calendar on the website with as much detail as you want to include.
Support services — A new service we launched this summer can help you improve your online reach and customer connections. You don't have to be a digital marketing expert. Let Capital Press Digital Marketing Services help you improve your online footprint.
Those are just some of the things you can find on our website that's celebrating it's birthday this month. Thanks for checking it out and for telling us the things you want an need in an agriculture information site. Your suggestions pushed us to expand our offerings. Thank you for your suggestions over the years. We appreciate them and hope they have come back to you in a site that is more useful to you.
Shortly after I came to work at the Capital Press in June 2005, I became involved with working on our Web site. Not long after that, this blog was started.
This became a place for testing ideas, experimenting with things that we could not do on our main Web site, and getting comfortable with my new role as an ag journalist.
Late last summer, when the Capital Press website was relaunched with new software, the new Web site became to focus of our Web development.
It is sadly ironic that as agricultural involvement in online tools, like blogging, has exploded within the last few month, the Blogriculture blog has sat fallow. I don't know what the future of the blog will be. While I have been the most active user/poster on this site, it was never intended to be a one-person operation. Maybe this fertile ground is merely resting for a future season.
There is no doubt that this site has been the most important digital contributor to the growth of our other Web offerings, which have expanded to include Facebook, Twitter and now, a mobile Web site.
It's that mobile Web site which has gotten much of my attention in recent days. There is still much work to do there. But I am a firm believer that mobile access is the next digital frontier for agriculture users who need information, whether in the office or on the go. Even those farmers who have been slow to embrace computers and website rely on their cell phones as a lifeline to the people they do business with on a daily basis. The phone is already a key tool for them, whether tucked in a shirt pocket or clipped to a belt.
Here at the Capital Press, we can already deliver information to your mobile phone via mobile apps that can access our Twitter and Facebook posts, mobile web browsers that can view our main Web site and now through our mobile-enabled website, which you can find at m.capitalpress.com, or www.capitalpress.com/mobile/, depending on your phone's browser.
Another way this blog has been important to us at the Capital Press, is that it has been a place where people have commented on our posts and provided feedback to us that we have used to shape our efforts. So, please, tell us what you want and need in the form of information delivered to you, wherever you are -- whether the method of delivery is a printed newspaper, one of our family of computer Web sites, or a mobile Web site or apps that provide particular types of data.
We still have much to learn in this never-ending journey. But we won't know what you need if you don't tell us. Feel free to comment here, in one of the forums on capitalpress.com or by e-mail.
I saw a link on Twitter around April Fool's Day for the website for CyClone Dairy. It has since been revealed that the folks at Ben and Jerry's are behind the phony dairy . Today I found this video and one more on YouTube, so I thought I would share.
This is just one more reason farmers, ranchers and agribusiness folks need to know what's being posted online and ag folks need to cooperate in telling their story using modern tools media tools.
So, with milk prices going down the tubes, does anyone think dairy farmers would be wanted to even explore cloning?
Interesting marketing technique for a company that depends on dairy products to scare consumers.
This year we are ready with almost twice as many Capital Press newspapers and California Ag Ads this year. In addition to the Capital Press showcase booth in Pavilion C, we have racks placed at all information booths at the World Ag Expo in Tulare. Come by and say "hello" at booth 3404. Better yet, purchase a subscription and ask about our special deal we are offering only during the show to our new subscribers here in California!
Vendors quickly make way to their locations in order to ready displays for the first day at the World's largest farm show in Tulare.
Capital Press advertising staff members from four states gathered in our Salem, Ore., office this week. Staff members meet at Capital Press HQ twice a year for a planning and training session. One of the big topics of conversation at this week's meetings was how advertising representatives can help clients reach their customers in print and online.
Technology now allows the Capital Press to serve clients and readers in a variety of ways beyond our best known medium of ink-on-paper. In the future, you may even see video used on Capital Press websites.
As a little demonstration, today I shot some photos and a snippet of video using a cell phone camera. You probably won't hear the audio, and the video is bad, but I just wanted to demonstrate what's possible with simple tools widely available to the public for the Capital Press staff.
Want a sneak peek at some of the ads that may be showing during the Super Bowl?
AP has some snippets from ads from Budweiser that you may be seeing Super Bowl Sunday. Click here to take a look.
Or maybe this one is more to your liking. It's an ad for a Sunsilk hair product, which features the late, great Marilyn Monroe with modern era pop starts Shakira and Madonna.
There are some other Super Bowl sneak peek videos available too from:
Pepsi;
Carmen Electra in an IceBreakers Ice Cubes spot;
and one about drugs.
