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.

Obesity and The Last Supper

Could the key to American obesity be found in artists' renderings of the Last Supper? Some scholars think so.

From the American Farm Bureau Federation:

Looking at the 52 paintings of The Last Supper, the meal entrees gradually grew by about 70 percent and the bread by 23 percent. Furthermore, the size of the apostles’ plates increased by nearly 66 percent.

While some critics blame modern farming and the advent of take-out food in the last 40 years for America’s fat problem, the authors instead suggest it's a natural consequence of “dramatic socio-historic increases in the production, availability, safety, abundance and affordability of food” that started more than 1,000 years ago.

Writer Tracy Taylor Grondine continues:

One can argue that food portions have grown significantly over the last 20 years. Take movie popcorn for example. Twenty years ago the average size of the theater treat was five cups, equal to 270 calories. Today, movie goers instead typically buy a tub that weighs in at 630 calories.

The super size trend continues in everything from bagels to burgers to pasta dishes to desserts. What used to be considered an extra large soda is now deemed a medium. Unfortunately, America’s waistbands have reacted accordingly. Approximately 65 percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese.

According to the article, your hamburger should be the size of a deck of cards, a slice of bread the size of a cassette tape, a baked potato the size of a computer mouse, and a portion of pasta the size of a tennis ball. To me, that sounds like a serious diet during Lent.

Reporter declares independence with his own blog

One of Blogriculture's contributors is setting up a blog at a new address.

Tim Hearden, a Capital Press reporter based in Northern California, is launching a new blog this week he calls the Jefferson Journal. As Tim describes it, "the Jefferson Journal, invokes both the name and spirit of the mythical State of Jefferson, a huge expanse of rural Northern California and Southern Oregon that briefly sought its own statehood in the early 1940s. Folks in these parts still have an independent state of mind."

If you've spent any time in the border area around where Oregon and California meet, you no doubt know that the Jefferson spirit is still very much alive and well. Residents of that area feel more connected to the interests of their cross border brethren than they do their respective state capitals.

Tim intends to tap into that deeply ingrained sense of independence and write on politics and other topics unique to the farmers and ranchers in that state, which may not exists on a map, but it definitely exists in the hearts and minds of those who live and work there. For some, the dream of a separate state of Jefferson still exists. This Wikipedia listing describes the history of the effort to form a 51st state and includes links to a variety of Websites that still carry on the banner of independence.

To Tim is declaring his independence and breaking away from Blogriculture. We hope he comes to pay us a visit from time to time. But we also encourage you to check out the Jefferson Journal and see what's happening over there too.

Celebrating an Ag Week anniversary

Four years ago today, on March 15, 2006, we started this little Blogriculture experiment. If you look back at the blog post for that day, you can tell I wasn't really sure what might become of it. The headline on the post speaks volumes: "A trial transplanting of Blogriculture".

I guess I can now, four years later, say that the trial part is over. Blogriculture has endured for nearly half a decade. If success were to be measured in number of posts, 2007 was our best year with 256 posts. Our least prolific year was 2008, with 113 posts. So far in 2010, this is only our third post. If that pace continues, this could become our least productive year.

Anniversaries are a nice opportunity for reflection. There are many good things that we have enjoyed from that first tentative step into the blogosphere for a farm publication. Most importantly it put us in touch with a lot of great people. Through Blogriculture we got to know Marianne Friers and her Northview Dairy blog. That contact spread to our expansion onto Facebook.

I was having a conversation with Tim Hearden, one of our reporters and Blogriculture contributors, about what might be the next phase of Capital Press blogging. Tim, who had his own blog through a previous employer, would like to get more active in blogging again. However, that may be in a venue other than the Blogriculture blog. I hope he does share more of his unique perspective in a blogging forum.

It seems we, in ag media, are a few years behind our journalistic peers in mainstream media in getting actively involved in online efforts. I believe this is because of the differing demographics between readers of ag media and mainstream media. Ag media's readers are older than mainstream media readers because farmers and ranchers, in general, are older than the general population. People working in agriculture have been slower to adopt use of computers and Internet in their daily working and personal lives, too. But that adoption has begun and is taking hold rapidly.

Media, including ag media, will need to go where their readers are seeking information. Increasingly, the places people go to get answers to their questions about what's new are digital media. That's unsettling for people in print-based media because we have to learn a lot of new things that take us out of our comfort zone. We are comfortable talking about things like circulation and column inches. But talking about pixels, bandwidth and unique visitors is sort of like trying to learn a new language in adulthood. No one wants to toss away what they have spent years developing expertise in to go back to the beginning of the learning curve. And it's also very different going from working with a once-a-week deadline to functioning in a world where there's a deadline every minute of every day. It's scary stuff.

But there are generations of young people who learned to use a computer mouse and a keyboard before they learned to write. For them, this stuff is not new. It's what's normal. It's what has always been. Those are the ranks from which the farming, ranching and agribusiness jobs of today, and tomorrow, are increasingly being filled.

So, the trial transplanting of Blogriculture is over. It's here, and hopefully here to stay. Certainly the Capital Press' efforts to reach readers interested in agriculture in the digital realm will not go away, regardless of whether Blogriculture lasts another 4 hours, 4 days, 4 years or 4 decades. As long as there is a Capital Press there will need to be digital components to reaching people.

And now, we have a lot more allies, and competitors, in using digital tools to reach people. Here's to hoping Blogriculture has many more anniversaries to celebrate. And most importantly, here to National Ag Week and celebrating all of those who produce the food and fiber we all need every day in America and around the world. Never has the message of American agriculture been more important to share with people who now live and work far from the family farm.

Happy National Ag Week.

Gary L. West
Associate editor
Capital Press

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.