Write an article for a general audience in a major publication

[vladh]

Writing an article and getting it published in a major publication that transcends Open Source could be a great way to reach a huge audience. The story around security vulnerabilities is compelling.

One formulation: here's when a huge security issue like the XZ backdoor caused a catastrophe; but it was averted; but this security specialist says it could happen again; here's how the OSS ecosystem works and why it's broken; here's how the Pledge can fix it.

Large publications:

• The New York Times
• The Guardian

Medium-sized publications:

• Aeon
• NOEMA

[vladh]

Talked to a bunch of people about this, mainly in academia, but no direct leads to contacts at big publications so far…

[vladh]

I really think doing this is a great idea and could have a big impact, but just from a timeline perspective, it seems challenging to have this done by October.

If we don't get any direct contacts, I think it might be best to pitch to Aeon. Their pitch inbox is probably less of a firehose than The Guardian, but just going off of vibes because I haven't managed to find any data, they seem to have a pretty big readership base, bigger than NOEMA.

They have a pitch page which is helpful, but it says:

The whole process generally takes about 3 months from submitting a good first draft until publication.

So even optimistically, this is too tight for our October goal.

I think we should absolutely move forward with this anyway and I feel great about it, but maybe we need to sort something else out for October?