Tom Chance's website

Journalism

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Just a brief follow up on Sebas' post asking for journalists to help KDE. If you're reluctant, here are some additional reasons to get in touch:

  • If you're worried about the quality of you work, then worry no more. There are a few experienced writers on the kde-promo list and amongst the Dot editors, who will help you improve your writing skills and shape your articles up.
  • If you're sceptical about the Dot, and think it's a waste of time, think again. The Dot itself has a fairly big readership, it is syndicated to many other web sites, and journalists often take Dot stories as the basis for their own work later on. You may not be writing code, but coverage brings new contributors & users, and raises the profile of the project, platform and community. Writing Dot stories is a very valuable contribution to the KDE Project.
  • If you think it will be a waste of your time, you're wrong. Building up a portfolio of decent articles that you've written for free gives you a useful platform for paid work in the field. I started out writing for the Dot and Newsforge for free, then earned a decent amount of money whilst at University writing for publications including The Daily Telegraph, ZDNet, O'Reilly, Red Pepper, Linux Journal, Free Software Magazine, LinuxUser & Developer, Linux Weekly News, Newsforge,The Liberator and Spark (my uni paper). If you already follow the Dot, PlanetKDE and maybe a mailing list or two then most of the research work is done, so it's actually very little additional effort for quite a lot of money! All of that experience was a big help in landing my current job. If you do enough good work you also get a good excuse to travel to Akademy and help out with the press team :)

So put pen to paper pen to key, subscribe to the kde-promo list and get in touch!

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