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List:       kde-promo
Subject:    [kde-promo] Suggestion: Establishing a press fact-check team
From:       Thomas Pfeiffer <colomar () autistici ! org>
Date:       2014-02-18 20:18:11
Message-ID: 12326548.FNjyy8zsXm () lenovo
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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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