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www.SugarProducer.com 31 Get the traits you require with the ser vice you'll remember. There's Something REASSURING About a Familiar FACE 155501Seedex12v.indd 1 9/2/15 3:47 PM 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. n Editor's note: Contact Phillip at phillip@sugaralliance.org. Visit www.sugarproducer.com for his previous column in the February issue.