The big boys

In our press centre there’s a hard core of science journos from the dailies – The Times, Guardian, Inde, Telegraph, FT, Mail, Mirror and Irish Times. There’s also a man from the Press Association who is one of the gang and some other hangers on who, quite clearly, are not.

The people from The Times and the FT have media fellows who have taken on the persona. The man from The Guardian also has one, but she doesn’t seem to be quite so involved. We get to sit in there right amongst the big boys. Sometimes we even join in a bit of the jokes and banter. But basically it’s obvious that we’re the new girl/boy. Our one redeeming feature is that we both have medical degrees and so can reliably be called on to answer those “what’s the difference between a tendon and ligament?” questions (tendons join muscle to bone; ligaments join bone to bone).

So yesterday when Nature decided to call a press conference on C .difficile at 1230 when everybody already had enough material for three stories, guess what happened? FT man asked his media fellow to go just in case there was a good story there. Times woman looked at me hopefully. I knew what to do.

Oh the poor researchers. A paper in Nature is something you should be congratulated on, not have to defend to would-be journalists. Three media fellows amounted to 50% of the audience. All three of them doctors. All three of them working in public health. Two of them with a special interest in infectious diseases (yes, obviously me who doesn’t do infectious diseases). The other two quite skilfully identified that the research was of almost no relevance to the NHS, the Health Protection Agency, or patients.

We had are very own little huddle at the end. There was no story.