One of the more difficult things for reporters working in the tech industry, especially those who aren’t really familiar with a beat, is finding contacts for free software projects.
Increasingly, projects like GNOME or openSUSE are in mainstream news, but finding someone to “speak for” those projects can be a challenge. This is doubly true when a site has no contact information for project “leadership” or stale information for the project.
As an example, I just pinged all the addresses on the GNOME Press Resources page — and they’re in a pitiful state right now. At an outside guess, I’d say that the page is at least three years old and probably older than that, and the bounces I just received reflect that. Luckily, I’m not on deadline or anything — I’m just trying to get information and clean the page so that we have good contacts for any press who are researching stories about GNOME.
A reporter on deadline might not get a great impression about the project if they pinged some of these contacts because they’d either get a “recipient failed” note from everyone’s favorite contact “Mail Delivery Subsystem,” or they’d get (even worse) a “subscription required to post to this list” in some cases.
This is not the way to receive glowing press coverage. Hell, it’s not necessarily the way to receive any press coverage at all.
If you’re participating in a FLOSS project, make sure there’s a prominent contact page where reporters, bloggers, etc., can find someone to talk to and get information from on very short notice. Some reporters are savvy and persistent enough to hunt developers down in IRC if needed or stalk mailing lists to find the contact info — but most won’t, and the best you’ll be able to hope for is “project could not be reached by deadline.”
This also highlights the importance of attracting non-developer contributors to projects. Maintaining this sort of information and putting together PR plans is something that a few developers are good at and enjoy, but not very many — and it’s rarely a good use of their time in any event.
I’ve always been a fan of a “Download Here” arrow to the binary packages or apt-url with a “Download our source for free! It’s open!” underneath with another link to “What does open source mean?” next to it.
.-= Colin Dean´s last blog ..Unlocking Kazuya in Tekken 2 the easy way =-.
Hi Joe,
You make some assumptions that I think should have better proofs.
Firstly you make the assumption that a project should/can have a spokesperson, and that there is a value in that spokesperson making time for a mainstream news journalist. I can see these being easy in some projects and much harder/less valuable in others. Part of that depends on what ‘mainstream’ means, I suspect it’s really that there’s value in each project finding a way to connect with journalists (be they old style or just community bloggers) with a larger (and relevant) audience than the project currently achieves.
One of my complaints on making time for mainstream news is that it can be too mainstream – you’re not reaching anyone who cares. Admittedly this is the opposite of the usual problem, but you as a volunteer just burnt time for no real value.
Another question is whether it’s better to support the journalists closer to your community – instead of talking to the journalist should you encourage them to work through those who grok your project. Effectively ditch the ‘spokesperson’ notion and use volunteers from your user base as a journalist source.
The notion that you can have a spokesperson is also a stretch. If it’s a community run project then the correct voice is that of the community’s. That the hypothetical mainstream journalist doesn’t get that doesn’t imply the community should change. My suspicion is that there is a habit of confidentiality that leads journalists to not want to discuss their story in advance on a public list. This isn’t open, so I’m increasingly believing we should be breaking them of that. The deadlines also fit into this – I’ve seen “I’m publishing today” far too often, I’m sorry but volunteer projects don’t run on Internet time in that way; something needs to change.
Another assumption I think you fall prey to is that of project role specialization. The notion that developers should focus on development and projects should add PR staff, advertisers, graphic designers, product managers etc. There is room for out-sourcing specialization, legal counsel and graphic design definitely are two high value tactical yet low value in-house areas. Project and product management, marketing, PR are something that open source developers are completely capable of embracing and the favoring of a specialized developer vs a jack of all trades creator is something I’d like to see challenged more often. There’s nothing wrong and lots right with developers learning about their business in the right way – it’s a great use of their time.
I’ll admit I’m probably taking you somewhat out of context – you discuss Gnome and openSUSE, large projects where specialization does start to have benefits in much the same way that Mozilla (to a larger degree) need these roles filled with specialists and definitely need to talk to a more mainstream press than the rest of us (probably not tabloids, but definitely the rest of the newspapers and major television news networks).
.-= Henri Yandell´s last blog ..Ubuntu Linux 9.10 on Dell Hybrid =-.
@Henri, I think you answer your own questions in your last graf: You’re taking me out of context. If you don’t feel it’s important to your project, then just disregard.
Yes, projects can have spokespeople. No, you’re not going to “break” journalists of habits. No, you’re not going to change the “I’m publishing today” problem. If a project cares about reaching mainstream users, it needs to work in a way that’s compatible with reaching “mainstream” (here I’m really talking about IT press) press. Good luck “breaking” journalists of a habit. What will happen instead is that your project won’t get the coverage it deserves.
It’s pretty clear from your response that you see PR and marketing as less specialized than other skills. That’s a shame.
Thanks for the reply Joe.
I’m not arguing PR/marketing down as a less important role than others. It’s critical for a project to understand the PR and marketing it’s doing; and wants to do. I do think that all but the largest projects should be looking at learning about PR/marketing instead of trying to get specialists; but I’d argue that for startups too.
My gut dislike is the idea that ‘mainstream’ PR and marketing is the way to go. These areas need reinvention in the same way that 90s proprietary developers have been reinvented. Rapid response spokespeople are an anti-pattern, grass roots has proven far more valuable yet I keep getting the feeling that projects get stars in their eyes when the mainstream media comes knocking and don’t think about how better to encourage the grass roots success they’ve had.
Reflecting on things – my basic disagreement is what I think you mean by mainstream. Mainstream media _is_ critical – mainstream media like Facebook, Twitter, your user community and the major blogs your potential user/contributor community read. What you have to focus on is not wasting your time on the non-valuable media like newspapers, TV networks and tech magazines.
I also often get the feeling that when people talk about mainstream media they are focused on more users – not sure if that’s your focus or not. I don’t think that’s the critical piece in the (fully open) Open Source projects – the grass roots flywheel works well for users. It’s presumably a bigger deal for the transparent projects where no committer is allowed who doesn’t work for the copyright owning entity; in that case getting users is the only area of interest. For the classic Open Source projects, the biggest issue is turning users into contributors into committers. Possibly I’m arguing that much more than PR/marketing, you need HR/training folk.
.-= Henri Yandell´s last blog ..Ubuntu Linux 9.10 on Dell Hybrid =-.