Just in case you missed this column in the last edition, let me bring you up to speed. Agriculture is facing an enormous communications challenge and the growing disconnect between growers and consumers is helping to contribute to some big-time headaches, such as GMO hysteria and obesity scapegoating.
This problem, in my opinion, is the result of the convergence of three main factors: generational shifts, a radically altered media landscape and the rise of pathological science. Last month, we explored the issue of marketing to Gen Xers and Millennials as Baby Boomers buy less and less. Today, we’ll tackle the changing media.
If you were born between 1946 and 1964 (a Baby Boomer), chances are good you received most of your information from newspapers and broadcast TV news. After all, there weren’t a lot of other alternatives.
And because everyone consumed news the same way in the good old days, those media outlets became lucrative businesses. Nightly news programs were the crown jewel for broadcast companies that could charge a huge premium for coveted advertising slots. Newspapers, too, were enjoying growing circulations and higher ad revenues, and the ranks of reporters quickly swelled to bolster coverage.
Then, things changed. Wall Street got involved and the news got swept into a broader big business binge as investors sought huge paydays. Mergers and acquisitions ruled. Hostile takeovers were commonplace. Everyone wanted to grow the world of news to maximize efficiencies of scale and cut costs. Stock prices now mattered as much as good journalism.
By the mid-1990s, newsrooms looked a lot different. Companies like Disney, GE, Viacom and Time Warner took over. And they did what big businesses do…they looked to get bigger. They acquired more and more news properties and helped expand consumers’ entertainment choices through cable and other avenues. They created cross-marketing opportunities where new cable stations, such as MSNBC, used content that couldn’t make the cut on nightly news.
Before you knew it, things like 24-hour cable news and all-day talk radio were commonplace. And instead of filtering just the most important news to fit neatly into a newspaper edition or a one-hour broadcast, pressure surfaced for non-stop information to fill a non-stop news cycle.
As if that weren’t enough, this era also gave birth to the Internet. The big businesses running the news didn’t exactly understand what the World Wide Web was, but they knew they wanted to own a piece of it and were willing to open up their pocketbooks to make it happen (the AOL-Time Warner debacle, for example).
Of course, bad things usually happen when you overpay for something you don’t fully understand. Enter the “dot-com bubble” that ran from 1997 to 2000. The burst was so loud it pulled down the big businesses and the economy as a whole, and massive layoffs ensued.
The era of traditional reporting was officially over. Newsrooms shrank. Research staffs evaporated. And pressure grew as reporters were expected to churn out more and more content with fewer and fewer resources.
Unfortunately, these pressures only intensified as the economy sank into a great recession after another bubble created by Wall Street surfaced. By 2009 major news broadcasting and print businesses had lost an average of 84 percent of their value in just a decade, and more layoffs ensued.
Media conglomerates, however, still had all those cable and radio news shows to staff. They just didn’t have the funding to do it. Enter the cheap (sometimes free) labor provided by talking heads and guest columnists who had agendas and were looking for promotional opportunities.
If you’ve ever wondered why news shows and, to some extent, newspapers feel like they are filled with opinion instead of news today, this is why.
This radical media makeover was difficult for agriculture, which had for decades based its communications outreach on a model of hard data and scientific research, not opinion. However, it was not an insurmountable challenge since talking heads can be influenced and farm leaders can provide entertaining opinions.
Too bad there was another gigantic shift just as agriculture was acclimating to the new culture.
Remember that little Internet thing from the late ‘90s?
Apparently, it wasn’t just a fad and in a few short years, it would forever change the way the world receives, processes and disseminates information.
Facebook was founded in 2004. YouTube in 2005. Twitter in 2006. And the iPhone in 2007. Now, anyone can be a journalist. And anyone can access an endless stream of information anytime they want to from the palm of their hand.
That’s a far cry from the days of crowding a small television set after dinner to wait for Walter Cronkite to tell you what he thinks is important in the world.
Today, 65 percent of people get their news online. As many people turn to social media for their news as traditional newspapers. In 2016, digital advertising will overtake television advertising in terms of dollars spent for the first time in history.
It’s a brave new world that is still changing (cord cutting, for example). And so far, agriculture hasn’t figured out how to harness its powers.