By Gil Gullickson, 2019-2020 AAEA/ACN president
The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber isn’t like Pastor Gilbertson or Pastor Bailey or any other Lutheran minister I knew while growing up in northeastern South Dakota.
She’s different.
Heavily tattooed and a recovering alcoholic, the ordained Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor reaches souls in a way that would have left my hometown ministers agog. Yet, she gave the most soul-searing witness I’ve seen regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When all this is started, I thought it’s okay, I could stand a couple weeks at home because after then, we can go to Holy Week services,” she said. “And then it was, well, I can’t wait preach at Pentecost (May 31).”
Of course, these hopes evaporated, as did a number of other preaching gigs she had lined up for this year.
“Then one day, I read about how dangerous singing was. Singing!” she despaired. Finally, she jokingly resolved herself to watching 62 hours of television as a version of comfort food.
Surely we can….
Bolz-Weber’s travails mirror my journey in helping to shepherd the American Agricultural Editors’ Association(AAEA) /Ag Communicators Network (ACN)and the Agricultural Media Summit (AMS) through all this. When COVID-19 lockdowns first started in mid-March, I figured, “Well, surely, all it will take is 15 days to ‘flatten the curve’ and we’ll all be back to normal.”
When that didn’t happen, I thought, “Well, surely, this won’t affect the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) meeting in late June in Denmark.”
Well, surely it did, when COVID-19 spurred Danish organizers to cancel it.
Then I thought, “Well, surely, we’ll all be able to meet in Kansas City in late July for AMS.”
Then in early June, the AMS steering committee of which I am a member, rescheduled AMS into mid-November.
On July 20, I thought that enough is enough. I was just about ready to send a “Why you should attend AMS” story as a follow-up to a great piece AMS chairman Chris Clayton wrote in mid-July.
“Surely, we can pull this off” I thought.
No.
That was the week when the proverbial AMS roof fell in as COVID-19 infections spiked. Members and sponsors became rightfully skittish about risking their health by attending the event. That week, nearly every other agricultural company and university that planned in-person meetings for 2020 converted them to virtual ones.
So Here We Are
We are committed to having the best virtual meeting ever on November 16-17.
We have sterling professional development programs lined up. We will have an awards ceremony that’s worthy of the talent we’ll honor. We’ll commemorate our 100th anniversary, but a share of it will move to our 2021 in-person meeting at the Loews Hotel in Kansas City next July or August. (As part of the agreement, we’re meeting there in 2022, too.) Our 100th anniversary book—compiled by Jim Patrico and Donovan Harris—will be mailed and delivered before the virtual mid-November meeting. In September, AMS will also host a virtual career fair.
Outside of AMS, AAEA/ACN is still in the black, and our finances will be bolstered by our virtual AMS meeting. Challenges remain, though. Membership is down, from 403 active members to 342 members this year. Not surprisingly, entires have also decreased in our revenue-driving awards contests.
To boost membership, we’ve kicked around several ideas, such as giving a certain percentage discount on bulk renewals made by companies. We’re also considering ideas to retain Agricultural Communicators of Tomorrow (ACT) members once they have graduated. Boosting membership is an ongoing challenge, given the economics of our industry. If you have any ideas, we would welcome them.
On the plus side, we still have raised $47,000 in sponsorships that companies have so generously committed. AAEA/ACN members Laurie Bedord, Willie, Vogt, and Elaine Shein helped turn what could have been a disappointing situation into a positive one by replacing an editorial internship that fell apart for Jessica Wesson. Jessica split an eight-week internship between Successful Farming, Farm Progress Companies, and DTN/Progressive Farmer. The marketing internship, sponsored by Gardner and Gardner and SAGE, was graciously hosted in person for student Dylan Davidson with US Wheat Associates. We also kept our commitments to students by awarding scholarships to four students.
Our Special Interest Groups have also kept busy, with educational webinars on covering subjects ranging from climate change to surviving and thriving in a COVID-19 world.
Internationally we’re represented by Steve Werblow as the new IFAJ vice president. Denmark is once again slated to hold the 2021 IFAJ Congress next summer.
We will prevail
In her Facebook post, the Rev. Boz-Weber spoke about Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who spent 7.5 years in a North Vietnamese prison camp during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was often asked how he endured, and what separated him from those who didn’t make it out of North Vietnam prisons. Surprisingly, optimists formed that group.
“They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again.”
Stockdale said that he was able to confront the brutal facts of his reality while maintaining that he would prevail in the end.
I’ve tried to keep this principle in mind with regards to AAEA/ACN and the Ag Media Summit. I have no idea when all this will end. That’s reality.
The bright side of all this is we have adjusted to a virtual world that nearly all of us would have thought impossible six months ago. It won’t be easy, but in the end, we will prevail.