Media is Changing Fast
Used to be, ‘reporters’ wrote news, and ‘activists’ wrote noise. We in the Ag industry have always assumed the output from the two groups lives in two separate places, visible only to their own, very different, audiences.
I’m not sure that was ever the case; I’m certain it’s not the case now. And this is key for Ag communicators.
Let’s take one part of the media eco-system: nonprofit newsrooms. The number of these 501(c) 3 organizations has soared to more than 425, according to the Institute for Nonprofit News. Many are geographically based, and many are niche-focused, including on topics like Climate Change and agriculture. More than 15,500 other outlets carry their (free) content, more than doubling in the past few years.
These niche newsrooms, like many nonprofits, have a strong sense of mission around a uniting point of view. They’ve become seen as virtuous truth-tellers, not the over-zealous activists many in our industry assume them to be. And before you think, ‘THAT’s activism, not journalism,’ I’d invite you to think again. Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable has been a tenet of U.S. journalism for more than a century (Peter Finley Dunne).
Take Investigate Midwest, for example. The Illinois-based nonprofit newsroom describes its mission as “serv(ing) the public as a watchdog over influential agricultural corporations ...” Here are two recent headlines:
Bayer, Corteva Control Vast Majority of Seed Patents
US Failing to Stem the Tide of Harmful Farm Pollutants
These are not headlines that, even a few years ago, would be seen in Ag-advertiser-supported, farmer-facing trade outlets. When I ran AgWeb, one of Ag’s biggest websites, I was forced to take down an IM story that an advertiser didn’t like. And turnabout is fair play: When I was at Bayer a year later, I insisted AgWeb take down an IM story I didn’t like. (Isn’t PR fun?)
Today, Investigate Midwest’s stories are carried by a range of trades, as well as national and global news sources like USA Today, The Washington Post, NBC News, Bloomberg, Reuters, and other market-moving media.
I recommend treating journalists from nonprofit newsrooms the same way we treat journalists from legacy media brands that are household names. When you get an inbound query from one of these reporters, you’d be well advised to take it seriously, and treat it with respect. This is not currently the case with many Ag companies.
That doesn’t mean we need to answer their every question, or bring them into our confidence. Would we do that with any journalist? Of course not.
But what’s wrong with providing responses to their questions that encapsulate your company’s mission and values, while attempting to add any important context that so often seems to be missing from their side?
I believe it’s important to understand that the media eco-system is endlessly entwined, pushing content to your key stakeholders in new ways all the time.
In my next post, I’ll discuss what it takes to get a proactive, positive story placed.