[Promotion] wake up... a news portal for free software?

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,

On Friday 10 February 2006 09:51, Quim Gil wrote:
> En/na Thilo Pfennig ha escrit:
> > I just have to state that
> > the current range of our "messages" is bad, bad, bad.
>
> I fully agree with you. Not sure if the solution to this problem is a
> new news portal though.
>
> If the aim is to create something like a press agency to impact the
> media we need to be conscious off the effort it takes. I'm journalist. I
> see the average resources and skills an average free software project
> has. I see ongoing initiatives followed by the media like NewsForge,
> Slashdot, The Register, eWeek. And I get to the conclusion that we
> better improve our on skills/resources/strategies to make us more
> noticeable in those media with our own words.
>
> For instance, talking from a GNOME perspective I think that before
> contributing to a common media project we better invest our energies
> first in the improvement of the information we and our projects
> generate. If we don't solve the poblem in the source how can we
> contribute good content to a common media?

As a fellow hack I fully agree. We've been working on this in the KDE Project, 
slowly, with documentation and the implementation of a proper release 
promotion process for big releases (e.g. 3.5). See, for example:

http://www.spreadkde.org/handbook/release_promotion

Free software projects usually write terrible press releases. Long, with 
nothing of interest in the first paragraph and no decent quotes. Half of them 
should never be sent out they're so boring. Just raising the standards for 
official press releases from KDE, GNOME and other major free desktop projects 
would be a big help. Then building better relationships with friendly 
journalists, getting our key messages out so the media picks up on our 
stories not their often-antagonistic angles, and beginning to break out from 
the eWeek/Newsforge/CNET bubble is something we need to aim towards. Our 
growing success with the more mainstream sites like eWeek and CNET is a good 
sign... we can capitalise on this success.

I think we can work on together on these goals. We can:

* share knowledge such as the handbook material above;

* help each other improve our skills by providing constructive criticism on 
this list;

* discuss our overall strategies that lead to our key messages to ensure that 
we don't lead the media to negative stories (e.g. the classic "ooh KDE has 
this and GNOME doesn't yet, nyahhh" angle);

* share resources such as press lists, good journalist contacts, press release 
distribution contacts (e.g. GNOME use Novell's (?) PR wire, KDE uses 
Linspire's);

* even collaborate on tools, for example my hobby horse of SpreadKDE which I 
see as a no-brainer for any major free software project, klik is a wonderful 
way of encouraging people to try software out, LiveCDs can be good tools too.


As for the original suggestion of creating our own media channel, I think it's 
actually a *bad* idea, a diversion from the important goals outlined above. 
We already have our own news sites, our own community planets and our own 
press releases. Aggregating things together sounds fine to me, but really we 
should be concentrating on improving the quality of stuff that ends up on 
news sites that non-free-software-geeks read.

How many new people would we reach with Jabana?
* Non-geek journalists /wouldn't/ use it as a source unless it was basically a 
high-quality low-volume press wire, in which case we're just duplicating our 
work elsewhere;
* Non-geeks would never visit it;
* It would need a lot of editorial energy to make good news from small 
projects;


We have to face up to the realities of the non-geek media and tackle them, 
rather than hiding behind groovy geek approaches. You get press coverage with 
good stories, good material to convey those stories and a lot of hard work.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
I'm aware that e-mails to me may be blocked by my host
because they are mistaken as spam. If this happens, 
please e-mail me at: telex4 at yahoo.com