On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 00:15 +0100, Deepankar Datta wrote:

> You mention that the project is lost. Maybe this would be an 
> interesting discussion on how to get things 'on track'. What would you 
> change?

To start with, the Marketing project needs to get a lot more savvy about
how to attract the attention of people in the media. That means learning
what makes a good story, and making sure that people like me hear about
it. 

Neither of these are happening. In the last 18 months, I've earned a
fair chunk of income from writing about OpenOffice.org, but every one of
the four or five dozen articles I've written about OOo has been
initiated by me. I've asked several times to be put on a media list, but
I have never had a story lead as a direct result of a news release or
private heads-up. The closest I've come is learning of an event on a
mailing list, or taking a suggestion (with credit) from an off-hand
comment.

I don't mention this because I want OOo to do my work for me . Yet
consider that, in the tech press in general and the open source press in
particular, I'm one of the writers who is most interested in covering
OpenOffice.org. If I don't hear anything official about what's
happening, you can be fairly sure that nobody else does, either. And,
since most other writers don't have my interest, they aren't likely to
dig for a story, either. For that matter, even with my interest, I can't
keep up with everything in the project, because I have other things to
write about as well.

OOo had a good start about 15 months ago when Robin Miller from the OSTG
group (Newsforge, Slashdot) gave an IRC seminar in how to write an
effective news release. Unfortunately, nobody in OOo seems to have taken
what he said to heart.

-- 
Bruce Byfield 604-421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield


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