Presentation by R. W. Trullinger, chief of the office of experiment stations and assistant research administrator of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at 1950 AAACE conference. Calls for AAACE to become a stronger professional organization and urges development of strong agricultural journalism training programs. "Has your group gone on record urging the Association to increase opportunities for professional agricultural journalism?" "There must be a basic reason why the editorial departments are so frequently assigned quarters in the basement or attic; why the editor so often has to take on nondescript chores ranging from the duties of janitor to teaching English."
Feels that experiment station literature is losing ground in the scientific world. "..scientists generally are not looking to the experiment station bulletin for important contributions to science." Suggests that the station editor can help maintain high scientific standards, as well as high editorial standards. "Briefly, then, believing that the chief function of an experiment station is to experiment and that the chief purpose of its publications is to describe the experiments and announce the results rather than to persuade people to adopt new and supposedly better practices, we are striving to raise the standards of our technical publications addressed to the scientist, whether he is primarily interested in agricultural research or not, and to make the publications addressed to our farmers technically sound and practically worth while."
