Q&A WITH BONNIE COOPER BY ANDREA EMOND
CLASSY, SINCERE AND FULL OF INTEGRITY – ALL TERMS THAT DESCRIBE LONGSTANDING HOLSTEIN JOURNAL EDITOR BONNIE COOPER. BONNIE HAS ENTERTAINED READERS WITH HER ENGAGING STYLE AND DEEP APPRECIATION FOR COW FAMILIES AND THEIR BREEDERS FOR OVER FOUR DECADES. WHEN THE JOURNAL PUBLISHED ITS FINAL EDITION LAST MONTH, BONNIE’S OFFICIAL DUTIES AS ITS EDITOR CAME TO AN END. BUT AS YOU’LL READ BELOW, HER WORK IS FAR FROM FINISHED. How did you get started at the Journal?
I grew up on a registered Holstein farm near Madison, Wisconsin, and later went to study at the University of Wisconsin to get my degree in Ag Journalism. When I was getting ready to graduate, I was looking for a job. I contacted the Holstein World, but they weren’t hiring at the time. They told me about a gentleman who was planning to retire from the Canadian breed magazine. I mailed in an application to Hugh Colson, the Editor of Holstein Journal. A few weeks later, on the same day I was leaving for a trip to tour Canadian farms through the University of Wisconsin, I got a letter inviting me up for an interview. I had never even been to Canada before that! I flew up a few weeks after my initial trip for an interview and was offered the job of Associate Editor.
was the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, two weeks after I started. I think Peter English or Bruce Murchison came with me to show me the ropes and introduce me to people. Since we were the official publication of Holstein Canada at the time – and up until 1990 – we used to be the only media invited in to cover their board and committee meetings. That really got me interested in the industry and its politics.
From there, it expanded into attending and writing about sales, working on the All-Canadian contest, attending industry meetings, and going out to do farm visits. We did a lot of county herd stories back then, too. You’d go into a county and do four or five visits in a day. You’d be at each farm for an hour or an hour and a half, come I maybe knew two or three Canadians at that point and had no back to the office and write the thing. Man, how did we do that?! family here. It was scary! Initially I thought I was only going to stay Now, you go in and spend two to three hours at each farm! a few years, but I plainly remember, sitting on an airplane five years in, coming back to Toronto after visiting family in Wisconsin and How have things changed since those early days? Before tape recorders, you’d visit a farmer, take manual notes, then thinking, ‘I’m not going back.’ come back to the office and type up the story on your typewriter. Tell me about your first assignment?
Technology in publishing has changed so much! When I came on in Back then, we used to write a lot of stories on production 1973, the Journal was in the process of switching from letterpress achievements and that’s the first thing I remember working on. We to offset printing. In 1987 we moved to desktop publishing and would cover the big producers, the top lifetime production animals, installed a Macintosh computer system to bring all our typesetting and Holstein Canada would supply us with the lists. My first show and layout functions in-house.
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