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. Since the intent of the press conference
is to help non-technical writers understand both the
IETF technology and the IETF ways of working, it would
be bad to let in bloggers who might use more than their
fair share of the question time. 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.
Too often, it
turns into ways to exclude unfriendly or non-mainstream
reporters, or to plant favorable ones.
That would be a silly thing to do now that the Internet
gives everyone an opportunity to have their say.
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. Whether or not the journalist
also has a blog is irrelevant. 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.
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. Like the Newcomer's training.
In this case, journalists know and understand the "press conference"
format so this is just part and parcel of speaking to them in
language that they understand. Why not let anyone ask questions?
Because the time of the people doing the answering is too valuable
to waste. They are there to talk with the press to help the
journalists understand what is going on.
Say what you mean, say it clearly, and publish
your own blog/newsletter/whatever if you need to. Complaints
about misconstrued quotes are also appropriate, because any
system needs a feedback channel. But trying to control the
press is not only worse than the disease, it's counter-productive.
(I'd be astonished if the reporter in question were not
reading this thread -- what will the next story be?)
That way lies madness. This is not about keeping things secret,
but about making things more open by making a concerted effort
to speak through journalists to the general public who are coming
to rely on IETF technology as part of the core infrastructure of
society. The IETF doesn't HAVE to do this. But then we will continue
to suffer from the very common problem of having complex technical
matters completely misconstrued in the press. It happens in every
technical field, sciences, engineering, medicine.
--Michael Dillon
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf