Here’s my view as a journalist who works in a mainstream daily newspaper.
I think if you target local media, you can get coverage easily. There’s always need for stories about nice initiatives and portraits of interesting people. That’s not the kind of stuff you’ll find on Metacritic.
As a journalist, your worst enemy is the lack of time. You need to avoid everything which takes too much time and makes your task impossible. Your main concerns are:
- Is it time-effective?
- Can I write a good story?
Three years ago, I wrote six portraits of game developers (
here it is, in French). None of them was doing free software. This is just because I didn’t find anyone in my area.
But even if your game isn’t finished, I’m sure you can get local coverage. There’s always stories about game developers who don’t even have an alpha.
The main problem I see the public understanding of FOSS. Most of our readers don’t know what «free software» is. «Open source» is widespread, but a lot of people think it means the sources are accessible.
Explaining what FOSS is can make your story pretty boring.
There’s also the lack of understanding amongst journalists. I hardly ever talk about free software with my colleagues. They associate «logiciel libre» (free software in French) with Libre office. Some use VLC and Firefox but doesn’t know these are free softwares. IMO, this reflects the lack of knowledge in the society.
Also, free software communities (I use plural on purpose) are very hard to approach and integrate. I grew up with Linux and played Freeciv, XEvil and other FOSS games. But I don’t feel comfortable on this forum, neither as a developer nor as a FOSS games player.
Within libre software communities, it’s a bad idea to even mention a social network or a proprietary software. Please don’t take it personally. Some zealots will always react as if someone who use a proprietary software has no value. Despising proprietary software isn’t a problem, but despising people who use proprietary software is not okay.
FOSS communities tend to reject newcomers very aggressively. It seems they don’t even notice it. We’re aware of the ideological infights, like free vs. open source, but I think we’re not very conscious of a lot of other problems, for example sexism in FOSS.
It’s also very difficult to point out these kind of problems without getting very agressive reactions.
Some members of the free software community are great people, interesting and open minded. Some others are worst to deal with than religious fundamentalists (I speak from experience, sadly).
Let’s get back to the first main concern of a journalist: time. The biggest issue is people with whom you can’t talk and who get crazy when you don’t write exactly what they assume you must write. A FOSS zealot looks exactly like this.
Besides, onpon4, Lyberta and farrer talked about our isolation. This isolation concerns at least the whole free software community.
Very few people know that Mac OS’s kernel is free software, Android is based upon free software, the Playstation 4 has an OS based on FreeBSD, the Wii uses a custom version of OpenGL. Very few people know most Web servers run on Apache and nginx.
We live in a computer driven society where most people are computer illiterates. When they reject any IT-related stuff, they’re not in good condition to learn anything about libre licenses either, even if it’s in their greatest interest…
If you have a solution to improve that, hurray.