'Useless' is in the eye of the degree holder

The biggest buzz online today among agriculture folks is about the Yahoo Education story saying 3 of 5 of the most useless college degrees are in agriculture fields.

Capital Press adds daily video updates

We have added a new feature this week to www.capitalpress.com. Editor Joe Beach is posting daily video updates to highlight some of the news stories you can — or will be able to — find on capitalpress.com and in the print edition of the newspaper.

We just posted the third daily installment online. So far, the video updates have been 2 minutes or less. You can play them from the home page of our website or from our YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/capitalpressvideo. We are also making them available through our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/capitalpress. So if you want a quick capsule of the day's ag news, Monday through Friday, look for the daily video updates to be posted by noon each day. You can watch them on your computer, netbook or even your smart phone.

Happy birthday to the new capitalpress.com

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.

A 'good ruling for wrong reason'

From the Pacific Legal Foundation:

Today’s Supreme Court decision affirming the constitutional right of Chicago residents to possess firearms for personal protection is “an important moment in constitutional history,” said Timothy Sandefur, principal attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, who authored the Foundation’s friend of the court brief in McDonald v. Chicago. “While some parts of the decision are disappointing, the bottom line is that the State of Illinois may not legally disarm law-abiding citizens. They have a constitutional right to defend themselves from criminals who never have obeyed anti-gun laws themselves.”

The 5-4 decision held that the constitutional right to possess firearms for personal protection— which was the subject of the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller last year—applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s “due process of law” clause. PLF’s brief urged the Court to use a different provision of the Amendment called the “privileges or immunities” clause, a provision of the Constitution that has been virtually ignored since an 1873 case called the Slaughterhouse Cases.

“It’s very unfortunate that the justices still ignore the crucial privileges or immunities clause,” said Sandefur. “Almost 150 years ago, the Fourteenth Amendment’s authors intended that to be the central part of the Amendment and, instead, the Supreme Court has refused to enforce it. This is sad, because that provision would offer Americans much stronger protection against unjust state laws.”

More here.

It's sort of eye-opening, really, that five individuals could have effectively nullified one of the original 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights -- and that those who would like to do just that came only one vote short.

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.

Commodity prices find a home at capitalpress.com

I took the commodity price charts off the Blogriculture site. We now feature the same price information on the main capitalpress.com website, in expanded versions that show a graph of the price trend for your commodity of choice.

We started out with the market prices here, in part, because on our old website software made it more difficult to add that type of information and the in our old layout there really wasn't a good place to put the charts. But now that the information has a home on our main news site, it seemed less important to have them here. Now I'm thinking perhaps we need to ad small versions of those charts to our mobile website next.

Perhaps we will use the freed-up real estate here to try out some other widget or feature to determine if we want to use it on our main site or mobile.

Web development continues at Capital Press

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.

Gary L. West
Associate editor
Capital Press

Newspaper association wants tax relief, not a bailout

President Obama says he's "happy to look at" a bailout plan for the newspaper industry, which some believe would amount to a virtual government takeover. But the Newspaper Association of America isn't interested, according to Advertising Age.

Proposals such as the Newspaper Revitalization Act, introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., would have "limited application" in the industry, The NAA's Paul Boyle tells the ad industry publication.

Instead, how does the NAA suggest helping struggling newspapers?

So the Newspaper Association of America is pursuing efforts that would benefit all kinds of for-profit businesses -- including newspapers. One big goal, for example, is legislation that would let big businesses apply their net operating losses to their taxable income going back five years instead of the current two years. Businesses with revenue under $15 million got that break in the economic stimulus package, but the newspaper association and many others want the provision extended and expanded to larger businesses.

Another big issue, particularly next year, is pension relief. The stock market's decline means companies may need to use cash reserves to meet federal funding minimums for their pension funds, the association said, instead of protecting jobs or investing in business activities.

Wow, what a concept. When their own ox is being gored, newspaper industry bigwigs discover the virtues of tax and regulatory relief for big business. Interesting.

Carry the Capital Press with you

The Capital Press now has web pages designed for mobile devices.

You can now access agriculture news on the road from your cell phone or other mobile device. You can get the latest headlines in your pickup, tractor, or coffee shop online at www.capitalpress.com/mobile or at m.capitalpress.com.

Is your bookmark up to date?

If you stumbled on this post because you were trying to find the Capital Press website and thought it had disappeared, fear not. The Capital Press website is alive and well, but it may not be where you thought it was.

The main website address, or URL, for the Capital Press is www.capitalpress.com. We have it printed in the paper, on bumper stickers, on the sides and/or backs of company vehicles. It's a well-traveled domain name. However, it appears there may be lots of people out there who have a different address — www.capitalpress.info — bookmarked. We've also seen numerous websites that also link to pages with that root URL.

That's completely understandable, albeit disappointing given the effort we've made to publicize the .com address. The capitalpress.info address was the original website address for the Capital Press website. We changed it, or tried to change it, a few years back. But if people held on to the old domain it was no big deal because the dot-info address still worked. It just redirected folks to, or mirrored, the .com website. One site, two addresses.

But, after the launch of the new Capital Press website over the weekend, we had a situation for a while where the dot-info address was pointed to the old website, which was no longer being updated, instead of the new, revamped website. So, we got that stopped and the old website is no longer live, but we have not yet got the old dot-info address pointed to the new, correct and updated site.

As of this writing, if you type in the www.capitalpress.info address (or use a bookmark with that address or follow a link that uses that address) you are likely getting an error that says: "Bad Request (Invalid Host Name)".

We are working on redirecting the dot-info address to the new www.capitalpress.com server. As soon as is humanly and technically possible, we will get that switched over. But if you want to do yourself, and us, a favor, just point your browser to capitalpress.com. That will get you to the new website now.

Sorry about the glitch folks. It was one of the many unintended pitfalls we've encountered in our website update, but it may be one of the biggest roadblocks to longtime, loyal website readers finding us. We have seen website traffic drop by about one-third or more since the conversion. The misdirected domain name and broken dot-info links seem the most likely cause. However, we are also likely missing out on some visitors because our RSS feed has changed too and as a result our headlines aren't feeding into our Twitter account via Twitterfeed right now either. There some sort of coding glitch that keeps Twitterfeed from telling there are new headlines in the RSS feed we are trying to make it munch on. And if you have an RSS feed reading into Google or Newsgator or some other RSS aggregator that link has been severed too.

If you do use an RSS aggregator or widget of some sort, I have some good news for you. We have multiple RSS feeds now, so you can get even more focused feeds. We have not yet put together a fill list of our RSS feeds because we may still want to add more of them. But you can find several links to the new RSS feeds on some of the popular sections of our website, like our Oregon/Washington, California, Idaho and Livestock section. You can also find the link to RSS for the part of our site that always includes our most recently posted stories. Even our Calendar is RSS enabled.

We are still online. We are still here. Here just may not be where you though it was, or where it once was, or will be once again when we get all the right servers and routers talking to one another.

New website tenative launch scheduled

We are tentatively scheduled to launch the new Capital Press website on Monday, July 27.

That date is still subject to change, but we are moving full steam ahead to make that date.

I hope to post an update here if that date changes as we get closer. I may even be able to offer a sneak peek at the site work in progress next week. The site is starting to come together, but there is still only test content on there and there are inactive links and non-functional features, so it's not quite ready for public viewing. I but I hope to offer loyal blog readers, Twitter followers and Facebook fans an advance look prior to the official launch.

If you have the homepage of Capital Press bookmarked, there will be no need to change that, as the address will be the same after launch. However, subscribers to our electronic newsletter will have to re-register and re-subscribe to continue to get e-mail updates. However, as we advance in our site development, we hope to be able to offer e-newsletter subscribers more newsletter options as far as focus of stories and frequency of updates. Right now we just have one daily newsletter and the option to get periodic (and infrequent) breaking news alerts.

So, keep an eye on the Capital Press website, our blog or our Twitter feed for updates and you may get a link to the test site.

Is that something folks would be interested in seeing? If so, you may be able to be among the first to see the new Capital Press website.

The great Spokane duckling rescue

Have you seen this video from Associated Press? It's of office workers in Spokane, Wash., catching ducklings leaping from a second floor balcony and helping them get safely to the river.

New online adventure is about to begin.

Two weeks from today we will be wrapping up training on the new software we will be using to build, update and maintain the Capital Press website. So look for some major changes coming to our news home page soon.

We don't yet have an official launch date, but I would guestimate we will be ready to go live by Aug. 1, and perhaps as soon as mid-July.

It's getting pretty exciting. New, shiny things are always fun. Although, I am also anxious about all the unforeseen headaches the relaunch might include, like broken links and other unintended consequences. However, hopefully we will be able to offer even more features for readers/visitors and more opportunities for interaction.

Change can be a bit scary. But it can also be a very good thing sometimes too.

Time has escaped from the bottle

Where has the time gone? June 13 marks my 4th anniversary at the Capital Press, but in many ways if feels like I just got here.

Perhaps that is because the Capital Press, our parent company the East Oregonian Publishing Co., and some of our sister papers are fortunate to have some staff members with long tenure. It's not unusual to have people stick around these parts for 10, 15, 20 years or more.

When I started working at the Capital Press in June 2005, it was something of a homecoming. I had worked at East Oregonian during vacations from college and joined the staff at the Pendleton-based daily in the Hermiston, Ore., bureau as my second job after college. When I first started working in the newsroom's photo lab in the summer of 1985, Mike Forrester was the editor-in-chief at the East Oregonian. He later become editor and then publisher of the Capital Press. Although he retired shortly before I came to the Capital Press, he still stops by from time to time as chairman of the Capital Press board and one of the owners of the company. I was seeing familiar faces from my first day of work at the Capital Press.

It doesn't feel like 24 years since I collected my first paycheck for this company and it certainly doesn't feel like 4 years since I got here. The only way I can quantify the passage of that time was that my daughter, who was born when I was in East Oregonian reporter back in 1991, is now 18. About the time I started my job as associate editor for the Capital Press I also attended her 8th grade graduation. Now, this month, she earned her high school diploma.

There is another obvious sign of the passage of time since my early days with the company. There is a black-and-white photo hanging on my office wall of me and four other photographers who were covering the Pendleton Round-Up in one of those summer/fall periods at the EO in the mid to late 1980s. The people who stop by my office and look at that picture don't seem to notice that I'm one of the people in it. And if I tell them I'm in the photo they usually can't tell which guy is me.

Well, the picture is black-and-white and it was taken a few years, and more than a few pounds, ago.

Still, there is some comfort in marking the passage of time, the changing of seasons, on familiar ground. So much changes and yet much remains the same.

I wish to thank my family and many friends for welcoming me back home in the summer 2005 and sharing so many special occasions with me these last four years. I look forward to many more special times.

I also wish to thank the Capital Press and East Oregonian Publishing Co. families who have extended so many professional opportunities to me over the years. I have gained a lot of experience and understanding of journalism and agriculture in the newsrooms of the East Oregonian, Hermiston Herald and the Capital Press. I also appreciate my colleagues and coworkers who have been receptive to the things I've suggested here based on things learned in other newsrooms and communities in the West.

And I also offer my thanks to all of you who stop in here at Blogriculture to check out what we have posted here. I've learned so much from the comments and interactions with my fellow bloggers too.

Four years. Wow. I can't believe how quickly the time has passed.

Oh, and if you are looking for anniversary gift ideas, the traditional fourth anniversary gift is fruit or flowers (I prefer fruit). The contemporary fourth anniversary gift is supposedly electrical appliances (and my iPod is showing it's age). Or is this my 24th anniversary? Funny, there is not traditional gift suggest for a 24th anniversary, according to my online website resources, but the modern gift suggestion is musical instruments. I have forgotten all I ever knew about playing the saxophone and I don't really have room for a piano, but I think the ever-musical iPod idea would still work.

OK, so I won't hold my breath waiting for the gifts.

New Capital Press home for online ag news under construction

There are some big changes coming to the Capital Press website, www.capitalpress.com.

This summer we will unveil a whole new look, feel and functionality to the site. We are currently in the process of moving our website software to a new vendor, which will update many of the features of the site. Our goal is to help you find the news and information you need to run your farm, ranch or agriculture business as effectively as possible in a quick and easy-to-use manner.

We don't yet have a final launch date yet, but I anticipate we should be ready to go live by the first part of August, and perhaps earlier.

We are still early in the conversion process, but I may offer Blogriculture readers a few sneak peeks as work progresses.

So, stay tuned. And once our site is launched and live I hope you will take the time to check it out and share your impressions with us so we can keep making progress to the ways we deliver agriculture news to our readers — online and in print.

Could "swine" flu have been created in a petri dish?

A scientists is offering a new theory about where the current strain of H1N1 virus, known popularly as swine flu, may have originated. In a story on Bloomberg.com, a researcher says the virus may have been a man-made error.

It's doubtful you'll be reading about that theory on website operating by activist organizations promoting the theory that large hog farms in the U.S. or Mexico must be to blame.

The Centers for Disease Control doesn't think the disease started in a lab, but the story indicates the virus may have originated in South America or Africa.

Anyone else seeing anything concrete being reported out there as to what the cause of this virus might have been?

Putting the president's tax cuts in perspective

President Obama's proposed budget will reduce federal spending by $17 billion, according the a administration's estimates. (Click here for a link to an AP story on the proposed cuts.)

That sounds like a lot of money. You or I could do a lot of stuff with $17 billion.

The cuts are part of the president's proposed in a $3.4 trillion budget. I can't fathom billion, so trillion is well beyond my scope. So I decided to cut it down to something that made more sense.

What would that level of a cut mean to someone who was making $50,000 a year, or even $20,000 a year? Here's what that would mean to your paycheck, assuming of course you got every dollar of that money and there were no such things as taxes.

Someone making $50,000 a year would lose $250 out of their paycheck. Total. For the year.

Someone making $20,000 a year would lose $100. For the year. Or to put that another way, it would be like losing about a day and a half of pay, assuming a 40-hour work week and working 5 days a week.

I wonder how many people who have been laid off or had to take weeks of unpaid furlough's would trade their circumstance this year for the sacrifice Uncle Sam may be asked to make in the next fiscal year?

Click here to download a pdf of the president's proposal.

Remain calm. All is well. Really

Pork producers have to be feeling a little bit like Kevin Bacon's character in "Animal House." This swine flu hysteria is getting out of control.

Visitors are coming to town this week

Capital Press reporters from four Western states will converge on Salem this week. We will be holding our annual news staff meeting on Thursday and Friday, April 2 and 3.

The people who report on agriculture happenings around the region, the nation and even the world will be gathering to talk about what we do and how we do it.

The Capital Press is a bit unusual as a news organization in that we have as many of our full-time staff members based outside of our main newsroom as we have working in it. Eight of our reporters work our of field offices in California, Idaho and Washington. Two reporters, a photo coordinator and 4 editors work out of an office in Salem, Ore.

During our annual two-day meeting is the only time all of our full-time staff members get an opportunity to actually see each other and interact as a group without the use of telephone line or computer chat software or e-mail or other means to communicate.

If you have an comments or question you would like our staff to be aware of as we sketch out our plans for the future, feel free to comment here.