Alan Guebert, a columnist for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Ind., writes about why The Wall Street Journal no longer writes in-depth articles about the farming business or agriculture.
Guebert writes, “The Journal now carries the news from Lincoln to London but rarely covers anything as provincial as agriculture. Long gone are the long, well-written front page epistles on emerging trends in farm production and food policies.
“Oh, disasters and scandal – drought, for example, or the now-frequent collapse of futures trading firms – still make the paper, but farmers and ranchers mostly do not.
“That’s not unimportant.
“When a newspaper the stature and reach of the Journal covered, say, a shortage of hay in Kansas or Deere & Co.’s new tractor line the nation’s business leaders got a refresher course on every American’s heritage – farming.
“Today, the Journal is less business-like and more news-like but it isn’t better. In fact, it’s more a two-note trumpet than a four-star newspaper. Those two notes are plaintive and daily.”
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It could be a metaphor with the distance most readers have from agriculture. Or, it could be that journalists simply don't know how to cover agriculture. Or, both? As a first-year journalism student, I was required to take an ag writing course. And, my economics curriculum included an ag econ 101 course. but that's so old school