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The New Farm
Having written for the premiere issue of The New Farm that went only to
advertisers, as well as for several issues in the early years of the
magazine, I'd like to offer a few of my observations on its demise.
Like everybody else, I enjoyed the magazine, learning something new even
from those articles repeating information or topics I already knew
something about from elsewhere. The fact that Rodale Press considered the
magazine expendable in part because the information in the magazine was
already published elsewhere strikes me as strange. When I stopped writing
for The New Farm in the early 1980s because they were no longer purchasing
stories from writers outside the company, I was told that they had hired a
few newspaper reporters to do all the work by phone. Later, as I moved on
to other publications and was originating new material that appeared
nowhere else, I started getting calls from these former newspaper reporters
staffing The New Farm. They were a brusque, rude lot over the phone, always
pumping me for phone numbers of sources that I was using in my own articles
so that they could write about the topic for The New Farm. When you start
with already published sources for your stories, you will by definition be
repeating stories already published elsewhere. Perhaps Rodale Press
publishers need to get more in touch with their newsrooms and their own
practices.
Perhaps sustainability also needs to apply to the process of publishing
about agriculture. Evidently, Rodale Press' farm publication division was
not sustainable, in my opinion because they adopted a stripmining approach.
I can tell you that there is no shortage of material of value to
sustainable agriculture being overlooked and going unwritten. The fact that
Rodale Press could not find it is a reflection of their methods, as much as
farmers' results are a reflection of their practices.
Having said that, I will still very much miss the publication, as it did
add something to our knowledge base. But I will not mourn for long, as I
think the electronic publishing diversity of the nonprofits coming across
SANET is the wave of the future. It saves trees and provides many more
sources to tap than any one print magazine can. As much as I like print,
the electronic publications distributed on SANET are the new future.
Joel Grossman
email(internet): 3216125@mcimail.com