If you're a producer you've more than likely read Grain News, The Western Producer, Financial Post and maybe even the New York Times. Have you ever thought about the writer behind the article?!!
Ask most people in agriculture why the coverage is so bad and you will get an answer about bias. Toban Dyck has worked in newsrooms on both sides of that argument and thinks the answer is duller and more fixable.
He grew up on a fifth generation farm in southern Manitoba, left for a journalism career that ran through the CBC, a national daily and a downtown Toronto startup, then came home and stayed. He now writes a national agricultural column and runs a communications firm built around the industry.
What's Inside
- Walking off the street into a broadcaster's office as a student, asking for the boss, and the internship he was never eligible for
- The cold email to a national managing editor that got answered the same day, and where it led
- Why he thinks the coverage problem is a staffing problem rather than a bias problem, and where the industry should be spending its effort instead
- The line about objectivity that reframes the whole complaint
- What it is actually like to be the prairie farm kid at a rooftop party in downtown Toronto
- Why he refuses to say the city was terrible, and what that costs him in certain rooms
- Whether it matters that most people know nothing about agriculture, and the test he uses instead
- Writing as a trade: the void in agriculture for people who can tell a story, and the daily practice he lost and wants back
Connect with Toban: burrforest.com
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