June 15, 2000
What factors are hackers confronting? >>
This piece is adapted from a talk I gave at Rootfest on June 15, 2000, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
It makes extensive use of spivak gender pronouns, which I like better than consigning all my hypothetical people to one gender or the other.
I first got the idea to give a talk about this subject when I attended the first Rootfest last year -- I was actually writing about it for City Pages, which most of you probably know is the local alternative weekly newspaper. Without really having enough technical skills to claim the term for myself, I consider myself someone who's relatively in touch with the hacker community. Still, until that first Rootfest I hadn't realized the extent of anger and frustration that a lot of hackers had towards the media -- towards seeing that issues that they cared deeply about were being misrepresented and distorted with a kind of depressing regularity.
So my talk is meant to help address this problem, from the point of view of someone who's been a working journalist for a couple of years. I'll be talking very specifically about how the news-gathering process works, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage to get your opinions represented as fairly as possible in the media. Since my personal experience is in magazines and newspapers, I'll be focusing on those areas, but most of what I say will apply to other media as well.
What factors are hackers confronting? >>