When the articulate and intelligent sounding person on the other end of the line doesn’t seem to ever have come across the word ‘dryad’, you know it’s time to start sneaking classical studies references into mainstream media… 
Category: rants
I’ve recently started volunteering at the Swansea Community Farm, one of only two community farms in the UK. Essentially, it’s 10 hectares of land which has been lovingly cultivated and nurtured over the last decade, despite a crushing lack of funds.
The Farm, as it’s generally referred to, is a registered charity, and it allows anyone who wants to come along and share the experience of mucking in on a small working farm. There are crops, animals, an apiary, a community composting project, a bog garden in the making, and all manner of exciting plans in the pipeline. However, it suffers from a lack of publicity; its online presence is out of date, and its marketing has been patchy — pretty much what you’d expect from a small project in the stormy sea that is the voluntary sector in the UK. (Hmmm… not sure that metaphor works, but it’s the best I can do right now.) Anyway, that’s where I come in.
We (that is, the rest of the marketing and promotions committee and I) are just itching to get started on the marketing and publicity problem, and we took the first step this week, in announcing a beekeeping course in partnership with the West Glamorgan Beekeepers Association that started this evening.
The South Wales Evening Post picked up on the story (yay), but oh, the pain, the agony… They lifted general information from the press release and attributed it as a quote from my source. I spoke to John Verran, regional bee inspector for Wales, to get his take on the state of Welsh bee colonies, and he gave me a very succinct response, which the Post used.
However, he most certainly did not say: “Bees play a vital role in agriculture, by pollinating crops and flowers. They act as a monitor of the environment, and of course, they produce honey, which has a number of health benefits and healing properties.“
I said that. In the press release. As background information.
Of course, I will report the mistake, and the Post may even print a clarification … but I shouldn’t have to do this at all. Sloppy journalists give the rest of us a bad name.
