There’s an old newsroom saying, “If it bleeds, it leads.” You know the one that claims violence, gore and conflict drives readership and viewership? It’s the same one that relegates good news to a sub header below the fold or pushes it to a back page or even to the newsroom floor.

It’s a fact, good news just doesn’t make the same kind of waves that bad news does and when it comes to seafood that’s never been more true.

Last week a Harvard researcher published a report that looked at 25,000 mothers and babies and found that eating seafood during pregnancy had important and measurable benefits. A release from Harvard University Medical School announced, “These findings provide further evidence that omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and compounds in breast milk are beneficial to infant development.” Harvard’s own paper reported on the study with a headline that announced, “For Babies, Seafood is Smart Food.” So, Harvard gets it. It’s a big deal. It’s an important study. No surprise there.

But where was everyone else? Science writers, you know– the Science Daily and Medical News Today crowd jumped all over it. Seafood industry media did too. And a mainstream blogger here and there picked it up. But the bleeds it leads crowd pretty much sat this one out. Just like they did when another Harvard study concluded that the properties found in seafood were so beneficial to heart patients it should be considered medicine not just dinner.

Despite best efforts did the main stream media not get the message about this study… or did they ignore it?

It wasn’t the New York Times or the Washington Post’s science writers who broke it down to simple, smart, consumer friendly language that highlighted why this study is a big deal. No, it was Salon.com who wrote, “the study did not show that eating fish during pregnancy led to issues associated with mercury poisoning, the fear behind the existing FDA recommendation that pregnant women eat no more than two servings of fish per week.”

Perhaps we should rethink how we examine the coverage. Did the bleeds it leads crowd snub this ground breaking report or did they get scooped by digital mastheads and savvy reporters who pay attention to ground breaking science? I guess that can be debated for eternity but I leave you with this; the week the Harvard study came out some very influential Pulitzer prize winning newspapers devoted science coverage not to this study but to – the first known photo of an animal mistaken for a unicorn, the impact of a planting error on the world’s second-largest nutmeg producer and koala bears in various zoos looking for a mate via online dating.