Editors' Notebook

I have often told the story of how I got into ag journalism. Working nights for a national wire service in the Omaha office, I had to go out at midnight to cover a murder/suicide. Some man had killed his estranged wife, who worked as a waitress at a downtown eatery, then killed himself. In the kitchen.

The next day I tendered my resignation.

A month later I was offered a job with a fledgling ag news operation that delivered market quotes and analysis and a little news via a 27-page satellite monochrome box. Orange or green text.

Best move I ever made.

I used to say DTN appealed to me because the only people who died were hogs and cattle. Reporting on the daily slaughter was not a problem for me, as I often enjoyed the fruits of the kill on a bun or slathered in barbecue sauce.

Now I have another reason to like my job. The only sex that we may report on is strictly the clinical, animal husbandry kind.

Sex in the regular news is wearing me out. As long as no national secrets were passed along during pillow talk, I don't care who had sex with whom in Washington. And I'm sure glad I don't have to cover it. Just thinking of the questions I might have to ask turns me a shade of red Husker fans are familiar with. I believe it's called "scarlet."

In our internet linked, cell-phone-with-a-camera connected world, everybody is a reporter and a photographer. There are no secrets. And email makes it so much easier to get yourself in trouble. Just dash off that incriminating note and push send. If you had to find pen and paper and envelope and stamp and drive to the post office, you might have time to reconsider sending your diatribe.

But that's not the world we live in. And I suppose if there were some sex scandal in agriculture that affected farmers' bottom lines (What WOULD that be, anyway?) we would report on it.

But we might not enjoy it.

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