On Fri, Mar 16, 2007 at 08:37:17PM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> In the past, there have been several attempts e.g. by the release team
> to send postings to one of those lists directly. In all cases this has
> been rejected by Joey, in one case he altered the text in a way the
> release team was not quite happy about the outcome.
Joey's given some specific suggestions on how to work with him to get press
stuff out, including on this list just the other day [0]. Joey has some very
specific ideas about how press stuff should work, and not everyone agrees that
it's the best way to do press stuff and announcements and such.
But equally it's not the only way to do announcements or press stuff
for Debian -- there are plenty of journos interested in Debian who are
happy to talk to developers directly if they've got something newsworthy,
and we've all got the ability to start our own website or mailing list
with global reach -- the only thing we need to do is build a reputation
for posting interesting things in our own right, rather than making use
of the reputation Joey's built for -news or -announce.
> How do you plan help the press team out here? Do you think a delegation
> of one person is enough for the press team this far?
I'm not sure press is a delegated position. At the very least list
moderation isn't a directly delegated position, but rather something
determined by the lists.debian.org maintainers, for which there is a team.
Joey's done a lot of work on press and announce stuff over the years, and
while there are certainly things I'd have preferred were done differently,
I think he deserves to have people working with him in the way he wants
rather than just having people given enough access that they can ignore
him and post whatever they want.
> And to AJ:
> In your mail "ajt's anti-rebuttal"[x] you have a whole paragraph about
> "Bigger teams" and a whole paragraph about "Debian publicity". Do you
> think you performed well in those both categories as DPL?
In general, if someone else is in charge of something -- like Joey
and press stuff -- and you don't want to work with them, I think
it's better to do things independently rather than fight over the
infrastructure. That's what I (strongly) recommended at the press
BOF at dc6, and what's since happened to one degree or another with
debian-publicity and Debian Times.
Andre Felipe Machado and some others have been tracking press mentions of
Debian in the wiki [1] which provides some measure of the effectiveness
of our press contacts. My take on that is that ultimately we're not
centrally setting the agenda by doing press releases, but by and large
rather other people are doing interesting things with Debian and that's
what's generating the news. I'm not sure that's actually that bad.
> What would you
> do to "encourage the press to talk to other people in the project than
> just the DPL" next year?
Having assistant DPLs and ambassadors who are actively pursuing their
own projects so they have something where they're the best person for the
press to contact, and they're clearly happy to be contacted by the press.
As far as Debian Times and -publicity (and -press/-news/-announce) is
concerned, I think whether they're going to be better noticed is mostly up
to their ability to find interesting things to talk about at this point.
Cheers,
aj
[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2007/03/msg00301.html
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/PressCoverage2007
http://wiki.debian.org/presscoverage
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