Use concrete details in your press release lead

Do you remember the Internet coffee pot? Back in the earliest days of the Internet, researchers at the University of Cambridge put a constantly updating image of their break-room coffee pot on the Internet. It had a utilitarian purpose — why go all the way to the break room if the pot was empty? But it was also a bit of an Internet sensation. I remember showing friends the coffee pot of the Mosaic browser and breathlessly exclaiming, “And this is all the way from England, and it’s live …” There really wasn’t a lot of content on the Internet in those days.

Compare then to this: a coffee maker that tracks your usage, and wirelessly “phones home” to order refills when you’re close to using up all of your coffee pods. If you think this is unusual, then you better strap yourself in, because from here on, things will get faster. The next phase of the Internet is arriving sooner than you think with the Internet of Everything.

“Selfies” may be the official new word of [the year], but Binge-Watching was a runner up for a reason. A recent survey conducted online by Harris Interactive on behalf of Netflix among nearly 1,500 TV streamers (online U.S. adults who stream TV shows at least once a week) found that binge watching is a widespread behavior among this group, with 61% binge watching regularly.

If the common perception of binge watching was a weekend-long, pajama-wearing marathon of TV viewing, survey respondents don’t see it that way. A majority (73%) defined binge watching as watching between 2-6 episodes of the same TV show in one sitting. And there’s no guilt in it. Nearly three quarters of TV streamers (73%) say they have positive feelings towards binge streaming TV.

Ken Burns’ recent documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” serves as a sobering reminder that we owe our existence to the top six inches of soil and timely rains. It also reminds us, as President Franklin Roosevelt wrote, “The nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.”

In the intervening 75 years since the Dust Bowl, farmers, ranchers, conservationists and policy makers have worked diligently to reverse the tide of soil erosion while making enormous gains in agricultural production. Working to heal much of the nation’s cropland affected by that ecological disaster, generations of farmers, ranchers, policy makers and conservationists deserve our unqualified appreciation and praise.

We now stand on the precipice of a new era in agricultural sustainability — one that seeks to not just stem the tide of erosion, but to rebuild the health and productivity of our nation’s soil. Rebuilding our nation’s soil health may well be the most important endeavor of our time.