Word: roesgen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...consider themselves lucky if they can cover their production costs. But one eastern Montana farmer, Gene Voss, did better-if on a small scale. With his winter wheat selling for less than $2 per bu. and costing $3.50 per bu. to produce, Voss proposed a barter deal to William Roesgen, editor of the Billings Gazette. "I believe wheat should be $6 per bu.," wrote Voss. "I would gladly bring you 9¼ bu. for one of your subscriptions...
Since a subscription to the daily Gazette then cost $56 a year, Roesgen accepted the offer as a way of dramatizing the farmers' plight. Then, sowing the seeds of a new kind of circulation campaign, he ran a front-page headline announcing that the paper would swap print for wheat at the federal support price of $3.05 per bu. (Meanwhile, the subscription price was raised to $61-or 20 bu. of wheat.) In ten days the Gazette had exchanged 100 new subscriptions for 2,000 bu. of wheat, which it stored in a parking lot next to the newspaper...
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