CONTENT ANALYSIS OF AGRICULTURAL TRAINING ADVERTISEMENTS IN NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS

It is obvious that the use of newspapers is one of the ways through which literate farmers could access agriculture-related information and are acquainted with innovations in agriculture. This study investigated the content of agricultural training advertisements in three Nigerian newspapers: The Guardian, Nigerian Tribune and Daily Times. Using multistage sampling techniques, 240 editions of these newspapers containing 609 advertisements for five years (2001–2005) were selected. In terms of agricultural subsectoral coverage, 30.3% were on veterinary services while forestry services recorded the least advertisement (4.0 %). The Nigerian Tribune newspaper has the highest coverage of agricultural training advertisements 40.7% compared to the 34.7% and 12.2% for Daily Times and Guardian newspapers, respectively. The result also showed that majority of agricultural training advertisements (81.10%) were placed on the non-prominent pages of the selected newspapers. Chi-Square analysis of association between the categories of agricultural training advertisements in the focal newspapers showed that there is significant relationship in the rate at which the sampled newspapers advertise different category of agricultural training advertisements in the newspapers (p<0.05). Chi square analysis also indicated that there is significant association between the placements of agricultural training advertisements and type of newspapers (p<0.05). This implies that advertisement placement on prominent pages of newspapers is determined by the policy of print media organization which also varies with cost of advertisement. It is therefore recommended that agricultural news items should be given more prominence as a panacea for increased information source to new entrants, especially the literate farmers to encourage farming.


Dissemination
of different agricultural information are priorities for technological transfer and acquisition of new skills in agriculture especially now that literate but less technically sound individuals are engaging in agriculture.Oladeji (1999) posited that the movements of the new entrant (literate farmers) who usually have higher education than the traditional farmers, into the farming enterprise have brought about an upswing in the literacy level of the farming audience.This group of people, mostly urban based, may rely on the news media especially the print media for the much needed agricultural information.Reilly and Clark (1990) indicate that training is a process through which knowledge, skill and attitude for a purpose of a specific job, task or vocation is developed through instruction and practice.Newspapers serve as the major advertising medium for the smallest retailers as well as some of the largest corporations.Therefore, there are agricultural content in Nigerian daily news; contents that must be content analyzed for efficiency.Content analysis according to Oladeji and Fawole (1999) is a systematic way of reporting social and economic life that is dominated or influenced by casual observations about the content of communication.
A broad channel of communication in extension is the mass media.Most mass media have a wide coverage and a far-reaching effect on agricultural information dissemination.Communication is a vital link in agricultural and rural development.However, agricultural news items have suffered limited coverage in Nigerian Newspaper (Olowu 1990;Salawu, 1983.While advertisements are predominant in most Nigerian dailies, most of the advertisements are non-agricultural (Oladeji and Olowu, 2001).Studies have been undertaken on content analysis of advertisements in Guardian newspaper (Oloruntoba and Olowu, 2001) on agricultural news and stories, visuals and information clues in agricultural advertisements (Oladeji, 1999)  in the nation.Newspapers that were in circulation throughout the five year period of study were purposively considered for sampling.Consequently, The Guardian, Nigeria Tribune and Daily Times Newspapers that have wide coverage both in space and in content were selected.
Using simple random sampling technique in selecting the months in order to determine the number of editions to be examined, 50% of the months in the five year period were selected for a total of 30 months (6 x 5), 50% of the weeks in the months were selected for a total of 60 weeks (30 x 2), while three days were chosen from Monday to Friday as week days and a day from Saturday and Sunday, that is, weekends.This exercise made a total of two hundred and forty days (60 x 4) for the study.Hence, a total of 240 editions of newspapers were selected, used and data were analyzed with both descriptive and inferential statistics.The content of all agricultural training advertisements were analyzed based on their themes.The specific content areas prominently reported are those that have immediate functional relevance for the target audience.However, to facilitate the content analysis, six content categories that were mutually exhaustive and

Reliability of Coding
To ensure reliability of data, code and re-code method of reliability was employed to crosscheck accuracy of coding using the Spearman Rank Correlation (r).
Here 20 newspaper editions out of the total sample were selected.The proportion of agreement was 87 per cent.

Content category of agricultural training advertisement
Findings showed that all the categories of Agricultural Training Advertisements were contained in the selected newspapers, except in the Guardian Newspaper that does not contain Veterinary Services and Agricultural Technology Advertisements.Olowu (1990) posited that virtually all aspects of agriculture production activities are newsworthy because they are found in newspapers.Table 1  The dominance of almost a third (30.0%) of the Veterinary Advertisements training categories may not be unconnected to the outbreak of epidemics such as the avian Influenza (Bird flu), Swine Fever and Swine flu in the livestock subsector within the period in the country.Again, livestock and fish farming are now in vogue among new entrant farmers than other aspects of agriculture.This brings to the fore the specific training needs advertisements for this category of farmers for optimum service delivery.According to FAO (1997), training is useful only when it is designed to meet the need of trainee, and is offered to people who will benefit from it.

Placement of agricultural training advertisements
Findings on Table 2 showed that the majority of agricultural training advertisements were placed on the non-prominent pages of the selected newspapers (81.10%) while few (18.90%) were displayed on prominent pages.This report is in agreement with previous findings that agricultural news or activities are mostly placed on non prominent newspaper pages (Agumagu, 1988;Fawole, 1995).Placement of agricultural advertisements on prominent pages of newspapers is a function of request for the pages by manufacturers, marketers or advertising agencies of agricultural products or services as well as the ability to pay the advertisement rates of prominent pages as advertisement rates differ for prominent and non-prominent pages of Nigerian Newspapers (Oladeji, 1999;Oloruntoba and Olowu, 2001).

Conclusion and Recommendations
The study concluded that the advertisements of agricultural training placed in Nigerian newspapers were not given adequate coverage and prominence.The study has revealed that while the coverage of agricultural items in the papers is all-inclusive, such news items are not given positions of prominence in the newspapers.This is a serious cause for concern when viewed against the need to provide exposure to new entrants literate farmers in the agricultural sector.Indeed, agriculture should be accorded its dominance role in the Nigerian economy as it was before the discovery of crude oil, which is now the main stay of the economy.It is therefore recommended that agricultural news items should be given more prominence and sponsors of agricultural programmes should be encouraged to help in reducing the cost of advertisement as agricultural training advertisements can be a panacea for increased information source to new entrants, especially the urban farmers on agricultural training programmes.

Table 1 .
presents the distribution of the categories of agricultural training advertisements.Findings further revealed that the Nigerian Tribune has relatively the highest coverage with 40.7% compared with the 34.7% and 12.2% for Daily Times and The Guardian respectively.Categories of agricultural training advertisements

Table 2 .
Prominence of agricultural training advertisements in selected Nigerian newspapers