The Rural Voice, 1981-11, Page 9Gobr
CANADA'S NATIONAL NEWSPAPER
Farm Reporters Part II
Kevin Cox in touch with the grass roots
by Dean Robinson
It's a long way from a dead
end in Hamilton to the front page of
Toronto's Globe and Mail.
Ask Kevin Cox.
He'll likely tell you it's equally as far
from the sideroads around Holmesville to
the prestige that's attached to writing for
what is arguably called Canada's national
newspaper.
And he's probably right.
He's also the first to admit that it has
been a series of breaks and coincidence
which has resulted in him being the
Globe's staff agricultural writer, the first
for the paper in recent years.
"They approached me," says the
28 -year-old Cox, who was farm writer for
the Hamilton Spectator. "That was this
past spring and I was anxious to try
something else at the Spec. I was thinking
about city hall or some other beat because
1 really felt 1 was at a dead end."
The Globe offer instilled some new
spirit and drive in Cox. "I guess they felt
that they had been ignoring a certain
segment of the population and they
wanted to do something about it," he
says.
Jumping to the Globe eclipsed a
five-year stint with the Spec for Cox, who
joined the Hamilton paper in 1976 as a
summer student out of the University of
Western Ontario's honours program in
journalism. Just as in the previous
summer, spent with the Citizen in Ottawa,
he made the rounds through district,
sports, copy desk, business and politics
and general assignment.
He joined the Spectator fulltime after
his student apprenticeship and was
dispatched to the paper's one-man
Cayuga bureau. In the Canadian
newspaper trade, bureaux traditionally
have been the training grounds for rookie
reporters. They can also be lonely and
frustrating and after eighteen months Cox
had had enough of Cayuga.
He was prepared to assume any
editorial job at the Spec just to get back to
Hamilton and for him the opening came in
the form of ag writer, to take the place of
Bruce Stewart.
The agricultural scene was not new to
Cox. After filing stories out of Cayuga it
couldn't possibly be. But this was his first
real crack at covering agriculture on a
regular basis.
The Spec apparently liked what he did
because it was not keen about shuffling
him into another area when the dead end
syndrdme set in earlier this year.
For Cox the Globe job came along at the
right time. Thousands of Canadian
farmers might say it was long overdue.
But that's in the past, they are now being
treated to some up -front agricultural
reporting and nobody is enjoying it more
than the reporter.
"There's not a lot of direction," says
Cox. "1 basically determine what I'm
doing." What he's doing is getting
farming and ag-related stories on the front
page of the paper, or close to it. And rural
Canada, at least rural Ontario, has taken,
notice.
"I think we've gone from a marketing -
board bashing paper to understanding the
system much better," says Cox. "Here
there is more time to in-depth stuff. We
certainly aren't holding off on criticizing
marketing boards but we're trying
desperately to give their side of the
story."
Cox isn't exactly wading into virgin
story land but he is doing something fairly
new for the Globe and its readers, and he's
having a hoot doing it. "The biggest rush I
get is sticking up for the little guy and
that's where the farmer traditionally has
been," he says. "I've always taken an
advocacy role. The food industry tradit-
ionally has been a closed shop and farmers
have been open. But there has always
been a mysterious middleman, and the
consumer now, more than ever, wants to
know why there are certain mark-ups. 1
think we're forcing some farm regulatory
boards to re -think their policies."
Though his body earns a paycheque on
Toronto's Front Street, Cox concedes his
heart remains with rural Ontario. As he
puts it, "I guess you never forget where
you came from." For insurance he gets
home as often as he can, to the home place
that his older brother Lawrence now
farms, and to see his mother who lives in
Goderich.
Such visits can do more than jog
memories of volleyball tournaments and
crosscountry runs at Goderich District
Collegiate Institute. "I was at a wedding
reception in Clinton (about five months
ago) and I picked up about five story ideas.
1 find I'll get more ideas at something like
that than I will by following bureaucrats
around," says Cox.
"The major drawback about being
down here (Toronto) is that you lose
contact with those (rural) people. Down
here you have to watch the politics. We do
get a lot of reaction, though, and 1 think
it's because there a lot of closet farmers
out there (in the city)."
Reaction is just what Cox wants,
positive or negative. He says the Globe is
anxious to have mistakes corrected and
misleading information clarified but it
needs the help of its readers.
He's hoping that farming Canada will
come to know the paper as one with a
sincere interest in agriculture. "It'll take a
long time to develop the beat," says Cox,
"even to get the farm community used to
us being here. But 1 hope they'll start to
call us with stuff just as they do other
papers that have had farm writers for a
long time."
The phone number is (416) 598-5000. If
he's not at his desk leave a message and
expect a return call.
Mrs. Kevin Cox? She's the former
Yvonne Stumpf, "a London girl" who is
features editor at Canadian Living
magazine.
The Cox typewriter gets little rest, and
Canadian readers reap the benefits.
THE RURAL VOICE/NOVEMBER 1981 PG. 7