Sugar Producer

30 Sugar Producer MARCH 2016 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. 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. FROM THE ASA By Phillip Hayes | Director of Media Relations The Brave New World of Media Frontier's large capacity end dump trailer saves time & money The Frontier end dump trailer's large capacity will save you time by reduc- ing the number of trips to the beet dump. The low center of gravity and the single point suspension makes the trailer very stable and the 46 degree dump angle insures a clean dump. The trailer weighs approximately 15,000 lbs. For more information on the Frontier end dump trailer call us today. 701-642-6656 Box 668 Wahpeton, ND 58074-0668 Frontier, Inc. Frontiermfg.com 144800Fronti16v.indd 1 5/19/14 8:15 AM 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

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