Media reportage of rice stories in the Philippines
2017
Nidoy, M.G.M. | Manalo, J.M. | Bautista, A.M.F. | Canilang, A.P. | Pasiona, S.P. | Larol, J.G.S.
Agriculture stories hardly get the lionshare of the media landscape. The mainstream media have always prioritized politics, entertainment, crime, and the economy. This is not favorable considering that there are many agricultural stories that can improve the lives of millions of poor people if only they are given the chance to be published. This paper aims to strategies on how agriculture news, specifically rice stories can be more visible in the mainstream media by increasing the pick up rates for wider readership and to rally support for rice R and D advocacies. Specifically, it seeks to characterize stories that get published in the mainstream media, identify ways by which products of research studies can be noticed to effect national policies, and identify agriculture stories champions. Media surveillance was conducted by PhilRice for all stories (1,444) on rice involving all national dailies, 70 community newspapers, and Metro-Manila-based television stations. The authors did content analysis of the data collected. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze of the data. Overall, 18% of the rice related stories came from or were related to PhilRice. Most of the stories on PhilRice were related to climate resilient varieties and technologies, and research studies. The top themes written on rice were on disaster risk management, El Nido mitigation and adaptation, and new technologies such as newly released varieties. The following factors are important in making rice stories more visible in the mainstream media: quantity of news releases, location of stories, timeliness, relevance, platform language used, and frequency of engaging media outfits.
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