Page 20 of Thursday's paper.
Apparently it caused a bit of hoo-ha. I went to a press conference about the research on Wednesday morning. When I came back and told the science correspondent about it she screwed up her face a bit and said: "Hmm, doesn't sound that interesting. To be honest, looking at tomorrow's schedule, I'm pretty sure it wont get in the paper". So I sat down and got on with something else.
Then at about 4pm, I decided what the hell and wrote it anyway. Miss Science Correspondent was actually rather impressed with my story and filed it and even flagged it specially to the news desk as something not on the schedule but maybe worth considering.
It turns out that the Daily Mail and the Independent ran it as front page news. It was also fairly high up the Today programme running order on radio 4. So if we (by which I mean, the organisation that I now totally identify with) hadn't run it there would have been uproar. I hadn't quite realised that there is an expectation that if 'our readers' have heard about a credible story through any other outlet, they will expect it to be in The Times - or at least that's the way the head honchos think about it. Which explains the exponential increase in media screeching that sometimes happens - if one outlet runs something and it's worth anything, everybody else feels it's their duty to cover the same thing. They don't see it as whipping up a frenzy, they just see it as providing the service that their readers, listeners, viewers expect.
One of the editorial people even came over to congratulate me on the story. Actually, I think he came over to give me a bit of a row for not flagging it up as an important story earlier in the day, but after he'd come over to our patch and said: "does anyone know who this Jean Adams is?", I think he realised that I was not a regular and not worth giving a row to and just said: "nice story" and turned around again and walked away.
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