On Sunday 07 April 2002 01:12 am, you wrote: > I'm starting to get a little peeved and suspicious of Newsforge with > regard to who exactly are they serving and where their reporters are > exactly getting paid from. (under the table or otherwise.) <SNIP> > > I can see where journalists could be bought off from within the open > source world. Not like it hasn't already happened in the big three > networks. Anyways, heads up.
As someone who considers himself a journalist (several tutorials, reviews and opinion pieces published in MaximumLinux and LinuxFormat magazines; three chapters contributed to Red Hat Linux 7.2 Unleashed and currently a technical reviewer for SAMS Publishing), I don't consider a lot of what I see published on-line as "journalism". It's usually opinion, fluff and shallow writing because that's what is easy and cheap to offer; on-line publishers don't have a lot of loot to throw to writers, much less buy them off - neither do Open Source companies. Remember that controversy builds page hits and advertisers are happy with higher page hit counts. My editorial pieces are written that way (controversial), but I try to avoid that in my factual articles. It's up to the Editor to see that the two types of writing stay separate; some do a better job than others and in my opinion, the boundaries are a little less clear for on-line publishing. When I wrote for MaximumLinux, Editor in Chief Brian DelRizzo told me that if a product was bad, write why it was bad; if it was good, write why it was good; don't pull a punch because they advertise; help them make the product better. I was told I could write what ever I wanted as long as it was factual. I have written some unfavourable reviews and the only response I ever got from an advertiser was that I got the capitalisation of their name wrong. As an intelligent reader, you should be sceptical of everything you read. Don't let someone else do your thinking for you. Learn to separate opinion from fact. As to Mandrake, they have become a market leader and are a legitimate target for criticism. My personal criticism of them is not so much of their product (which I believe is very good), but of their management (I'm a former corporate Senior VP, so I understand that as well), which I believe is inconsistent and unfocused. Given that they have a good product, it makes sense to improve their management and they show every sign of making that attempt. With every release, they refine their process and they _seem_ to be learning from their marketing and management mistakes, albeit slowly. Hopefully they can get it together before the money runs out. I don't believe that the solution is to "post positive" because that is just a public relations ploy, simply putting a favourable spin on topics. I suggest that the best approach is to "post truthfully" and think critically about what you read in others' posts. If a problem arises with a Mandrake product or practise, they need to know about it. How they handle it is up to them. Simply putting a pleasant face on it is a certain invitation to disaster. If you want to positively influence the on-line press, write a factual review of some little-noticed Mandrake feature (like multiple network profiles, msec, and so on) and submit it to the on-line press for publication. Just remember that spelling and grammar count for things like that, aim for 300 to 600 words, keep it factual, avoid being superficial, give pros and cons and make it "tell a story", i.e, have a beginning, middle and end. It's not that difficult. If you want some advice, let me know off the list. -- Hoyt http://www.maximumhoyt.com
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