July 23, 2013 — Maybe if the seafood industry could present a united advertising campaign, misinformation and negative news (I still shudder when I think of a conversation I had with an acquaintance after the BP oil spill) can be combated faster and easier and good news can have a broader reach in mainstream media.
When SeafoodSource first launched, I was in charge of writing a bimonthly column called Media Watch, which explored mainstream media coverage of seafood industry related topics.
In order to find out what seafood industry stories the mainstream media was fancying, I set up Google alerts to be notified whenever keywords like “seafood,” “aquaculture” and “fishery” were popping up in the news outside industry sources.
A lot of what the media likes to report on when it comes to seafood has to do with health — benefits or scares. Pregnant woman should eat more seafood, seafood helps prevent dementia, omega-3s, and on and on and on. It got to be that even I had seafood-is-good-for-you and mercury-isn’t-as-big-of-a-deal-as-it-seems (or is it?) fatigue and started glazing over the research studies and avoided mentioning their coverage in Media Watch.
In the past couple weeks though, a new report — about seafood consumption lowering anxiety levels in pregnant women — keeps showing up in the Google alerts I still get every morning. That, combined with Mike Urch’s column on SS yesterday about how the seafood industry needs to do a better job of explaining to consumers why seafood is healthy to increase consumption, got me thinking.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource.com