Stuart Erskine, originally from New Zealand, has been doing some freelance photography for us as he travels around Saskatchewan.
Complimented about the amount of information he provides for cutlines, he explained the secret to getting the details: he asks the subjects to tell him, in their own words, what they are doing.
He gets the correct information, and he also learns about agriculture in a country with which he is not familiar. The terminology differs here from New Zealand.
Any jargon he doesn’t understand, he gets the farmers, researchers or whoever to explain further to him.
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The simple question he asked is something all reporters should remember – especially if they’ve worked years in the same beats.
Paula LaRocque, a writing coach for the Dallas Morning News, said often reporters on a beat sound like their sources.
It’s a hazard that the editors and reporters need to be aware of and watch for, she said:
“As writers we should constantly ask ourselves ‘is there anything in here that I once had to ask, what does it mean? Any jargon, any language? Am I making too many assumptions?'”
When reporters say their readers will understand them, they’re only hurting the newspapers:
“We’re going to get a narrower and narrower audience. The job of all of us, whether generalized or specialized, is to increase our audience, not to narrow it.”
While the majority of our readers are farmers, no one will be familiar with every term we’re publishing.
Agriculture is a very extensive subject: it can include production techniques, seed varieties, livestock or poultry breeds, farm policies and programs and enough acronyms to fill an encyclopedia.
A newspaper should not write only for the people who are directly involved in a certain area of agriculture, but appeal and be understandable to the wider agricultural audience.
