Whiskeymartini

Nobody Reads the Morning Paper Anymore. So What Are We Actually Reading? I once tried to write a proposal narrowly focused on journalism students, how mobile phones were reshaping the way they consume news. Good topic, but honestly, the moment I started researching it, I realized the story was bigger than one classroom. It's not really about journalism students. It's about all of us, and what happens to news the moment it stops being something you sit down for and becomes something that just... arrives. As a comms person, this is the stuff I think about constantly, not just "is the audience on mobile" (obviously, yes), but what mobile actually does to how people relate to information once it gets there. News stopped being an event and became a background noise There used to be a shape to how people consumed news, the morning paper, the evening bulletin, appointments you kept with information. Mobile broke that shape entirely. Now people "snack" on news, ...

This is a question I keep coming back to as a comms person who's spent time around agricultural development work. Not "can we push out more messages," but something narrower and harder: can the right message, on the right channel, actually move someone from "I've heard of this improved seed" to "I bought it and planted it"? I got deep into this a while back while working on a research project , and it's stayed relevant to how I think about comms work in development generally, because seed adoption is really just a communication and behavior-change problem wearing an agricultural costume. The problem isn't that improved seeds don't exist Tanzania has improved varieties of beans, groundnuts, sorghum, seeds bred to yield more, resist disease, handle drought better. The problem is that a lot of young agripreneurs either don't know these seeds exist, don't trust them, or can't find a reliable source. Traditional extension serv...