> This is the sort of thing that bothers me. Bob called me an hour
> before press time and he asked if I knew anything about BrandZ because
> he needed to write something. I told him that I was more focused on
> the porting issues and on getting software packages for the SchilliX
> distro. He told me quite frankly that he was a reporter and knew
> nothing about it, who could he call to talk with them about it. Heck,
> I don't know. This is open source now and you should probably check
> the OpenSolaris web site or maybe catch a kernel engineer. That sort
> of thing.
>
> The real thing that bugs me, is that we put so much emphasis on these
> things that show up in the press that are written by people that know
> nothing about what they are writing about and they write it at the
> very last minute.
With all due respect, how else do you think journalism is done? Reporters
_aren't_ experts -- they're expected to be generalists who can both get the
story right and and can get it quickly. Different media (web, print,
radio) and different formats (breaking daily, feature weekly/monthly) will
strike different balances -- but (certain NYT stories about the NSA excepted)
no one simply sits on a story once it's done. By definition then, stories
are written at the "very last minute." This is not to defend shoddy
journalism (of which there is plenty), but merely to say that you can't
condemn a reporter _just_ because they need to go from nothing to filed
story inside of an hour...
> If software were written this way ... ghastly things would happen.
I'd flip that around: if press stories were written the way software is
written, your daily newspaper would show up once every couple of months,
would take several hours to figure out how to open, and (for reasons
unknown) would burst into flames if both you and your spouse tried to
read it at the same time.
- Bryan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development. http://blogs.sun.com/bmc
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