I came across the following story via Twitter about the plant that pretends to be ill (http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8108000/8108940.stm) and decided to have a look after a couple of days to see who and what in terms of other news agencies had picked this up. The reason I chose this seemingly random article was because it was written in a simple easily readable way, was not pitched at scientists, and was framed in an explicatory way – in other words, by steering away from a controversial subject, I was (I hope) placing some kind of objectivity in the choice of a journalist or whoever might pick the story up.
I was surprised that it was only repeated online and referred to in blogs, and not picked up by even some of the less busy newspapers – I haven’t done an exhaustive search by the way…
Anyway, the point of the lesson is I think this is exactly the type of story that should be finding its way onto our newspapers, even though it is far from being newsworthy by normal standards. I would even go so far as to suggest that if it was headlined as “Plant shows benefits of selective advantage” or anything more eyecatching, it might have been picked up more readily. There are studies out there that show how much journalists rely on this type of story (the Cardiff report for one) that would have led me to believe that it was inevitable that it would re-appear in a newspaper. Maybe it will yet appear in one of the those that have dedicated science pages which are published on a weekly basis, I’ll revisit this if it does.
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