How to issue a press release
Write one (base it on current press releases from http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/), get all involved parties to approve it, take care of trademarks, quotations, etc. HTMLize it.
svn checkout svn+ssh://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnomeweb-wml/trunk/www.gnome.org/press/releases/
- Choose a name (year-month-topic.html makes sense, as in 2008-02-guadec2008.html) and copy an existing one to it, edit, svn add, edit Makefile.am to add the respective .html to list of pages to be generated, commit. It will take a while about fifteen minutes before it shows up on the website.
Add a link to it from http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/.
Add news entry to http://foundation.gnome.org/ if it makes sense (foundation-web SVN module). Don't forget to also add the news to http://foundation.gnome.org/news/ and to update the ChangeLog.
Add news entry to http://www.gnome.org/ if it makes sense.
- Blog in the foundation blog when it's open.
- Create a shorter, text version of it for email text. Add link to press release for full details.
- When the time comes, send the email to foundation-announce, foundation-list, any other relevant lists. Include devel-announce-list if it's about development projects. Send a separate copy to advisory-board list if it makes sense (ie. is not a membership-only announcement like elections).
Post a news entry to http://gnomedesktop.org/. Post on Digg and reddit.
- If relevant to the site, post news item to the following, linking to the announcement or the gnomedesktop story:
Linux.org - mail editors@linux.org
LWN - mail Jonathan Corbet at corbet@lwn.net
- (what follows is a braindump of other pertinent sites, with no contact info)
CNet - Colin Barker or Matt Asay, maybe? List of editors & staff writers
- Linux Journal - Doc Searls could be a good entry point
- Linux Magazine
- ZDNet - Dana Blankenhorn or Paula Rooney
- The Register
- Groklaw, if relevant
- O'Reilly's Radar, if relevant
- BBC News, if it's big enough
- ...
To get into international press, mail gugmasters@gnome.org - ask each GNOME group to reproduce a list of news sources for their language/country & forward on the announcement
- If it's a really important announcement, try contacting Jim Zemlin at the Linux Foundation and asking them to push the release for us through their press agency (Press One).
- Blog it on p.g.o
Oh, if you have a banner for http://www.gnome.org/, put it up and link to press release.
- Sit back and relax... until the queries pour in.