I'm sure everybody has seen what happened when a mailinglist post by Bruce Perens got "leaked" to Slashdot. I see part of the problem that the "news" people are seeing a dearth of news from the Debian Project, so are skimming the mailinglists as a substitute for timely information from the Debian Project. For example, both Potato's attempted freeze and its subsequent delay should've been released to various outlets while it was still possible to "spin" the story, for want of a better term. Instead, in both cases, the news got leaked out via the mailinglist posts, which were written in technicalese and in an informal style that is fine for mailinglists, but lousy for press releases. The next instance of the dearth of information from the Debian Project causing damage actually DID cause Bruce Perens possible legal damage and entirely too real damage to his Good Name. My suggestion is that the Debian Project nominates/elects (an) Official Spokesperson(s) to Slashdot, LWN, and all the "geek news" outlets, said spokesperson to maintain membership in all Debian mailinglists, and to provide timely, edited information about all topics that may interest the relevant communities (the Linux community most obviously, but the BSD community is saying many things about the Debian/FreeBSD project based again on the information from mailinglists as well, among others), and also tell the mailinglists affected what's going out under their AEgis. Another idea that may have merit is to subdivide the task either by interest group or list--a slashdot commentator, a LWN commentator, etc. The outlets are already looking at the mailinglists, the only thing we can do about it now is to provide a better alternative than publicly airing what were supposed to be semi-private messages.
<a mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>Who is John Galt?</a> Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product. -- Ferenc Mantfeld
