Non-news values in science journalism

In February 2011, a team of scientists announced that they couldn’t see the space beneath a lump of crystal.1 Of course, they didn’t put it quite like that in their paper in Nature Communications and nor did the journalists who picked up the story. Rather, converting a highly constrained instance of nonseeing into a newsworthy event, both scientists and journalists referred instead to the creation of an “invisibility cloak.” As the Daily Star put it: “Scientists have created a real-life Harry Potter style ‘invisibility cloak’.”2