A rewarding career: Barker retires as AgriNews publisher

LA SALLE, Ill. — The words upstart, advertising and agriculture intrigued Lynn Barker to apply for a job at AgriNews that resulted in a nearly 42-year career with the company.

Barker recently retired as publisher of Illinois AgriNews and Indiana AgriNews, a position he held for 24 years. The Illinois State University graduate started as an advertising representative and held the position of national advertising manager prior to becoming the newpapers’ publisher.

As a student at ISU, the native of Beardstown didn’t plan to spend his entire career involved in the agricultural industry. Barker originally studied political science in college with the goal to pursue a career as a lawyer.

“My parents were educators, my dad was the principal at the grade school and my mom was a grade school teacher,” Barker said. “But probably half of my class was related to farming.”

Barker’s closest connection to farming was the summer he spent working on a Christmas tree farm.

“My job was trimming Christmas trees with a machete,” he said. “We wore shin and toe guards for protection.”

By his junior year at ISU, he switched his focus and graduated with a double major in political science and mass communications. Barker began his career at Illinois AgriNews in March 1978, a paper that began publishing during the prior year.

“AgriNews was one of the few independent agricultural newspapers in the country,” Barker recalled. “There were ag newspapers in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Indiana at that time.”

“Lou Lesniak was the idea guy, and the whole idea of AgriNews was to target the working farmer and farm families,” Barker said. “The basis of AgriNews was built around local news and local advertisers.”

Selling advertising for an upstart newspaper was not any easy task, Barker stressed, and he heard the word “no” quite often from many ag companies.

“When I started, I worked out of the Morton office, and I had a sales route in east-central Illinois,” he said.

“We always wanted to make at least 13 sales calls per day,” he said.

“After being told ‘no’ the entire day, I pulled off on the city square to reflect and I told myself I had to find another job,” he recalled about a day early in his career. “After 15 minutes of reflection, I made my last stop of the day and sold a two column by 5-inch ad.”

Advancements in technology had a significant impact on how Barker completed his work for the AgriNews, which originally was owned by Miller Group Media and recently was purchased by Shaw Media.

Once an advertisement was sold, AgriNews salespeople used grid paper to design an ad and sent film to the home office in La Salle to be developed for pictures that were included in the ads.

“All our work was packaged and put on Greyhound or Trailways buses on Friday nights,” Barker said. “One of the tricks of the trade was finding a phone booth to call clients with a calling card while you were on the road or to call the home office.”

Now, the retiree said, ad sales people submit ads for the AgriNews through the internet, including art and photos.

“Technology has made our jobs easier because sales people can show spec ads or previous ads on their tablet while visiting a customer,” he said.

AgriNews employees attended all kinds of agricultural events to introduce the paper to as many potential readers and advertisers as possible during the initial years.

“I would go to the consignment auction at Martin Auction Company, set up a card table and hawk newspapers,” Barker said. “The Martins recognized early on that this publication had potential, so they welcomed me there.”

Among Barker’s fondest memories of his work at the AgriNews is the day an equipment jockey from Mexico walked into the office.

“He had found our newspaper at the Martin consignment sale a couple months before,” Barker said. “He was back in the U.S. and he traveled to La Salle, Illinois, to pick up the AgriNews.”

As websites on the internet became important for companies and organizations to provide information, the Chicago Board of Trade contacted AgriNews Publications for some assistance, Barker said.

“One of the traders who was on the CBOT board asked us to be a content provider for the CBOT website,” he said. “So, we worked out a system to provide content every week to the CBOT, and we probably did that for a year before they started doing that work themselves.

“The AgriNews is successful because it is all encompassing — we don’t just concentrate on row crops or raising livestock,” Barker said. “And we don’t only include the business of farming, but also the lifestyle, as well as youth activities like 4-H, FFA and county fairs.

“The agricultural industry is exciting and how we have transformed from the ‘70s with technology to where we are today has been fascinating,” he said.

“The people associated with agriculture are really why I stayed with the AgriNews,” he said. “I didn’t come from a farm, but I learned to love agriculture, and most of it was the people and what we’re doing as an industry as far as technology.”