The Rural Voice, 1983-03, Page 8E DFflF kJTERS:
Westex in London
They live in two different worlds.
A small group of cub reporters, who
know very little about agriculture and
complain about being boxed in by
telephones and computer paraphernalia
on the second floor of an old building
at an Ontario university, is producing a
daily farm "newspaper" for a small
group of farmers with large operations
in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, roughly
1000 miles away as the crow flies. Up
until late last year, the reporters, recent
graduates of the MA program at the
University of Western Ontario School of
Journalism, had never even visited the
provinces where their product is read.
They are pioneers in space age
journalism. The shape of things that
may come has its pros and cons, some
irony and a lot of kinks that are being
worked out.
It's called Westex News and it's on
the Grassroots system. It's the first
daily videotex news service anywhere,
custom designed for farmers. Westex
isn't what most people would identify
as a "daily newspaper" although it is
trying to do the same thing—provide
hard information for Prairie farmers in a
competitive way. Very little paper is
involved, Westex wastes fewer trees,
and the typewriter has likewise gone
the way of the dodo, replaced by a
computor's video display terminal
(VDT).
The idea left "the ivory tower" and
drawing board last April when heavily
subsidized Westex went live from the
converted language laboratory in Mid-
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PG. 8 THE RURAL VOICE, MARCH 1983
dlesex College at UWO's journalism
school, to Grassroots subscribers in
Manitoba (and later Saskatchewan).
If you subscribe to Grassroots you
get Westex by punching the appropriate
buttons. At five cents a minute, a
five-minute browse costs less than
most more conventional daily newspa-
pers. Instead of a front page with an
index the first page a reader gets on the
television -like screen with Westex is a
general introductory page, listing the
top story in a headline -like form in four
categories: world news, national news,
provincial news and local news.
Say you want national news. Press
more buttons and bingo, you get the
national news "menu" page which lists
the day's national stories, also in head-
line form. Each category has a nine -sto-
ry capacity. So say headline three on
the national menu intrigues you, which
may say something like: "Trudeau turfs
Tories as Grits grab West." Hmm? You
could read all this scoop by, again,
punching the proper buttons.
The news is new again late each
afternoon, but Westex is thinking of
going twice daily with morning and
afternoon editions. according to senior
editor Henry Overduin.
Westex gets most of its stories the
same place most daily newspapers get
most of their, from the Canadian Press
(CP) wires. The videotex news operation
subscribes to three of these; the A and
B wires and the CP prairie regional
wire. Westex only picks the stories it
feels will be of interest to its audience,
then tightens them up and rewrites
them according to videotex style, which
is clear and concise and to the point.
"While farming itself may be a spe-
cialized business, farmers share all the
interests and concerns of people in
general," says Overduin. "Westex News
addresses the concerns of the agri-
cultural community as a community of
people as well as a community of
highly -technical, food -producing spe-
cialists. There is room for announce-
ments of blood donor clinics as well as
the Crow debate and the latest an-
nouncements from the Wheat Board."
Westex also writes some of its own
stories, a percentage of the total that is
increasing, as it slowly develops its
sources from telephone interviews,
press releases, reports, statistics and
studying competing media. Staff also
files stories on Prairie achievements at
such major agricultural events as the
International Plowing Match and Royal
Winter Fair. The videotex news service
is also now researching computer data
banks for information that somewhere
down the line might provide further
news sources, as the definition of
"agricultural news" itself perhaps chan-
ges. G