Re: Suggestion: Establishing a press fact-check team

We reached out to press before. I agree we can and should assign a few
'press co tacts' and reach out a bit more...
On Feb 19, 2014 4:28 PM, "Thomas Pfeiffer" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Dear KDE promo team,
> as some of you may know, recently we had at least two cases [1,2] of a
> certain
> news site (Phoronix) reporting about discussions on KDE mailing lists which
> were not made public by us yet, and - far worse - getting some important
> facts
> wrong.
> Some KDE developers consider such news sites "The FOSS Yellow Press",
> because
> they tend to pick up any news they can get and present them in a way aimed
> at
> maximizing clicks, not producing quality journalism.
> We've tried to contact Phoronix' main author on several occasions but got
> no
> reply, so we assume he simply does not want to talk to us.
> That by itself isn't a huge problem, since Phoronix is a blog and not a
> press
> website, so people should take what they write with a grain of salt
> anyways.
> The problem is, however, that other, generally more reputable, press sites
> tend to pick up news posted there and link to them without properly fact-
> checking them first. This, in turn, may lead their readers to think that
> Phoronix posts the truth. This problem certainly isn't limited to one blog,
> Phoronix is just the most prominent example.
> On a Google+ comment thread [3], we discussed how to deal with this
> situation.
> Among the suggestions was to move discussions we don't want media to
> report on
> prematurely to private mailing lists or to try to convince the press to
> ignore
> Phoronix (and other "FOSS Yellow Press" outlets). I think the first
> suggestion
> would be bad for a FOSS project, and the second simply isn't feasible.
>
> What I think would be a more constructive way to deal with the situation
> is to
> task a few people which have good knowledge of - and ideally connections
> with
> - the FOSS press landscape with looking for articles which get facts wrong
> or
> grossly misrepresent something - or link to such articles without proper
> accompanying comments - and offer to clarify the facts.
> Though this would not keep the "Yellow Press" from spreading nonsense to
> get
> traffic, it would at least keep those sites which care about quality
> journalism
> from repeating that nonsense blindly.
>
> This is not an easy task, as we need to make sure we don't come across as
> trying to censor the press, but letting factual errors spread across the
> FOSS
> media landscape is just as dangerous.
>
> Do you think this makes sense? And if so: Are there members of the team
> willing and able to take on that task?
>
> Please keep me in CC on your replies, since I'm not subscribed to the promo
> list.
>
> Thank you,
> Thomas
>
> [1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4NjU
> [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYwNjM
> [3] https://plus.google.com/+MartinGr%C3%A4%C3%9Flin/posts/T23tK6r4qLb
>
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