Agriculture Coverage

By Dick Weiss
July 31, 2008

For this edition, we focus on agriculture --from wheat to cherries to chickens. Three reporters from newspapers in the West and Midwest have taken very different approaches to their stories. But what they have in common is a gift for putting pictures in readers' heads with telling details.

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3 South Korean market bears fruit
Mai Hoang of The Yakima Herald-Republic
Mai Hoang self-nominated this story and I'm glad she did. It's an incisive and readable piece on how Washington cherry growers took advantage of an opportunity to sell their product to South Koreans. Mai makes this story special by showing not just the business angles but how cherry growers learned to understand and appreciate Korean culture and use it to their advantage. Mai added this note to her submission: I want to nominate this story to inspire reporters from papers my size (or smaller) to do big projects. I think it's easy to fall in the trap that good stories always come from big metropolitan papers. I interned at several large metros before coming to the Herald-Republic two years ago, and I learned that good stories can be found anywhere, regardless of a paper's circulation or budget.

2 In gamble of farming, harvest in Kansas county promises a payoff
Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star
Wheat farming in Kansas? Who can make that interesting? Montgomery does with vivid writing that makes you care and understand. None of this is written in the first person, but note how Montgomery brings his own personality to the piece through some wry observations and phrasing.

1 Agriprocessors escape big fines for violations
Clark Kauffman of The Des Moines Register
In a three-part series, Kauffman reports that state records show that health and safety violations at the problem-plagued Agriprocessors Inc. rarely result in large fines even though horrific injuries are commonplace there. Kauffman provides some rather gruesome details, but in an understated manner which makes them all the more effective.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism