PUBLISHED BY MANITOBA BEEF PRODUCERS
FEBRUARY 2023
CE 1998 SIN
District 2 director Nancy Howatt snapped this early morning photo of the hoarfrost on her field in the Manitou area. (Photo credit: Nancy Howatt)
Reflecting on a Quarter Century of Cattle Country When Karen Emilson arrived at her job interview with a mock-up for a newspaper called Cattle Country, it landed her the job as Communications Coordinator with the Manitoba Cattle Producers Association (now known publicly as Manitoba Beef Producers). The reason? Her concept perfectly meshed with the what the organization was seeking – someone who could help develop strategies and resources to improve how it communicated with its members across the province. Emilson, who had plenty of newspaper experience, set to work on the daunting task of creating a new newspaper from scratch. “Because I had owned a newspaper (the North Interlake Echo), I knew how to price things out, get a mailing permit through Canada Post and all the things
you needed to know how to do,” she says. But priority number one was to attract advertisers. For the first Cattle Country edition, which came out in May 1998, Emilson took the bold step of giving away advertisements for free. It paid off: when she phoned those advertisers back, they all bought ads for the next months’ issue and some of them are still advertising in Cattle Country today. Of course, the newspaper also needed content, and in the early days Emilson wrote a lot of the stories and editorials, focusing on telling producers what their organization was doing. But she knew that the paper needed other voices and so, she managed to persuade some knowledgeable industry people – like veterinarian Dr. Allan Preston (former Chief Veterinary Officer of Manitoba) and Rick Wright (Executive Secretary of the Manitoba Livestock Marketing Association) – to write
regular columns. “People loved it,” Emilson says. “When I went to events, I would take along copies of Cattle Country and when producers took the paper, about 80 per cent of them turned straight to Rick Wright’s page.” Wright’s marketing column is still running – and still hugely popular – today. In fact, many features of the original Cattle Country have endured through 25 years; its excellent and informative articles, regular columns, President and General Manager columns, director and staff profi les and discussions of current issues that are important to Manitoba beef producers. Perhaps that’s because of the good foundations that were laid, in those early days, that the paper has built on since. Page 8
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BY: ANGELA LOVELL