Re: About IETF communication skills

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch at muada.com>]

On 1 aug 2008, at 0:57, <michael.dillon at bt.com>  
<michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:

> > I don't know what "accredited" means anymore.

> IMHO it should mean "real journalists" in this context.
> That excludes technical experts who play at journalism
> on their blog.

Right, we wouldn't want to encourage reporting by people who actually  
know what they're talking about...

Anyway: face it, everyone, even reporters, has opinions, and everyone,  
even "technical experts" can write about the IETF.

What would the goal of accreditation be?

> After all, there are
> no restrictions on non-journalists writing anything that
> they want so the IETF doesn't lose anything by restricting
> a press conference to people whose dayjob is journalism.

Except openness.

> > These days, the analogous issue is whether or not
> > bloggers are "real"
> > journalists.  I would hope that most IETFers would object to
> > that distinction.

> You can't object to a technical fact. Of course then there is
> the clarity of terminology, so lets define journalist as someone
> who is paid to write articles for a publication and who is
> at IETF to do their dayjob.

A more useful distinction would be that if journalists get in for  
free, they only get to listen in meetings, not talk.

> This definition does exclude
> people like me who are not currently paid to write and who
> only write on things like blogs and mailing lists.

It doesn't exclude me, though.

> > To put it bluntly, I'm not at all in favor of trying to
> > manage news coverage, especially by organizational
> > mechanisms.

> My suggestion was not about managing new coverage at all,
> but about providing a venue for a specific section of the
> attendees that have special needs.

I would suggest that if the IETF wants more accurate press coverage,  
it should, along with managing expectations, produce press releases.  
For most meetings, I don't think the number of tech journalists that  
would show up is sufficient to warrant press conferences, although it  
might in places like San Francisco.
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