As a part-time journalist, I receive a fair number of press releases.
Most get tossed, unopened, in an effort to simplify my life. When I
do open a release, it all too frequently contains news of some VP of
paper clips who has gotten promoted to Senior VP of office supplies.
I have considered writing a form letter to send back to these folks,
but it has never seemed to be worth the trouble. In short, I'm not
too keen on press releases.
I do think some kinds of PR materials are worthwhile, however. For
instance, if I am trying to write a column on a topic, it's great to
have a clearly-written white paper that tells me more than I can put
into the article (but enough that I don't say silly things in trying
to boil the topic down for the reader). I tend to find these gems
by means of a web search and may follow them up by contacting the
author(s) and/or PR contacts that are listed therein.
All of which leads me to believe that FreeBSD might benefit from a
web-based collection of white papers and other press resources. I
don't know who is going to write these, but pulling a few documents
(or links to documents) together onto a page might be a good start.
Another useful PR technique involves writing articles and getting
them published. The press needs a continuous stream of articles to
keep the ads from slamming together. If you have the ability to do
an authoritative and readable article on a topic of interest, you'll
have no problem getting it published!
MacTech, for instance, likes to get technical pieces on Macintosh-
related topics; what about a critique of the Mac OS X kernel (including
sections on the I/O Kit and the Mach subsystem) by someone who actually
understands what's different from vanilla FreeBSD?
Or, at a slightly higher level, an article could discuss how Apple used
pieces of NetBSD and FreeBSD, including their reasons for using which
pieces where. Ideally, an engineer from Apple should write this piece,
but they're unlikely to have the time. OTOH, getting an Apple engineer
to review something should be quite possible.
Before anyone asks whether I'm volunteering to write pieces of this sort,
I'll state that I fully intend to write some Mac OS X material, but I
may not be in a position to write certain pieces, simply because I don't
have the necessary background. In any case, we need LOTS of articles and
I can only write so much on any topic without starting to repeat myself.
Getting back to the press release notion, I do have a suggestion. The
"FreeBSD in the Press" page (http://www.freebsd.org/news/press.html) is
a great starting point for a "press contacts" list. If someone in the
FreeBSD community (and/or BSDi) wants to start feeding material to the
press, consider contacting these authors and asking them how the FreeBSD
Project can help them write more pieces!
-r
--
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