On 1 aug 2008, at 0:57, <michael(_dot_)dillon(_at_)bt(_dot_)com>
<michael(_dot_)dillon(_at_)bt(_dot_)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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