Most researchers regard their work as vital to society, even if that value is only higher order and the chain to societal benefit is tenuous to outsiders.  That's no different than any other job - people at the Department of Motor Vehicles feel like the entire state would halt without them and, in an elaborate food chain, they are right, and the same holds true for environmentalists who worry that some obscure critter going extinct will have a butterfly effect on worldwide ecology.  In a domino world, they are also correct.

But researchers are different than those other examples because they can't just do their jobs, they have to not only show they are doing their jobs, they have to prove they should continue doing them, and then raise the money to do it.

That leads to a variety of ways to show value to funding committees.  One of those ways is citations of work.

Gene Russo at Nature has published a primer on effective communication and reminds scientists that people who get the most media coverage get more citations.   That's good.  But he also cites an example where a legitimate study led to a ridiculous global warming-inspired press release title by the school of one of the researchers and another researcher was in the difficult position of having to either show up the other school or debunk the whole point of the interview.    "By the middle of the next century, an increased concentration of carbon dioxide will decrease the aragonite saturation state in the tropics by 30 percent and biogenic aragonite precipitation by 14 to 30 percent"  did not mean that the Great Barrier Reef would crumble within 50 years, as the press release stated, but you can bet NPR did not have the researcher on there to talk about aragonite saturation.

Russo has a variety of tips in his article so I'll leave that alone, though I will add one presented by Greg Critser at our AAAS panel on science communication in 2009.   His takeaway message to scientists was to train science journalists on how to be better science journalists, namely by managing their expectations on what to expect from you.   That's right, a journalist wants you to help make better journalists, and he knows of what he speaks - as a young reporter knowing nothing he had to walk into Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann's office and talk physics with him - and promptly got thrown out, but not before Gell-Mann told him what to do and know before he came back.

Regardless of whether you like dealing with the media or not, you should adapt the mindset you have to do it.   I know a subset of researchers reading this will bristle at the notion that I am telling them their jobs but if you are going to take public funds, and the overwhelming majority of researchers wouldn't have it any other way, you have a duty to show the public what you are doing.   

That's not to say you should be outrageous in your self-promotion, like Darwinius with the television special and a marketing blitz prepared for when the study was released along with the usual missing link claim.   Carl Sagan was also looked down on by fellow scientists of his day because of his populist work though, in hindsight, his inspiration to a generation of scientists can't be questioned and many of his detractors remain unheard of outside 30 people in their fields.   But there is an unwillingness to be self-aggrandizing and then there is hurting the value of your research by not making it known when it isn't that hard to do so.

It's something of a balancing act but scientists are already smart people so I know it can be figured out at each institution, given knowledge of their own culture and style.    Read Russo's article for tips on how to succeed and my article The Pitfalls and Perils of Communicating Science To The Public in Communicating Astronomy to the Public (CAPJournal V1 Number 2 , 22-23 2008) for things to avoid.