openSUSE:News team

openSUSE News

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Introduction

Our mission is to make news.opensuse.org a place that is worth reading by openSUSE community and people interesting in openSUSE by informing them about what's going on and showing them how to engage with the project.

The news editor takes care of two things: Quality of articles and scheduling of them. The editors will ensure the content, quality of articles with reviewing and editing meet the readme on the github page. The team also works on getting more articles and news out, as well as spreading the news across the web.

Use of news.o.o.

The openSUSE News Website, provides news to the community.

news.opensuse.org is meant for the publishing of official news about the openSUSE Project and it distributions. Only articles about official packages in the distribution or announcements in the interest of the community and Project should be published. Articles out of scope, in particular written to promote packages or home repositories, are discouraged and may be subject to the removal of the article.

We advise that information that fits the following circumstances be published on the author's blogs, on an email list or other appropriate communication channel and not published on news.opensuse.org:

Information about a call to action for the community
Information about an open-source project, its community and users
"How to use" or "tutorials" about packages (official or unofficial)

Blogs are shared on https://planet.opensuse.org/, which is a web feed aggregator that collects blog posts from people about openSUSE.

Communicate

If you want to publish something to get a wider audience of openSUSE users, consider using your blog and https://planet.opensuse.org/ to get the word out.

Here are some basics:

planning: you REALLY need to give us time to schedule things. Contact us 3-4 days, preferably earlier, about what you're planning to do, so we can work out a time and date with you.
scheduling: news gets most attention on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Don't publish big news items on Friday or no weekends! Also, due to the loyalty of our audience and the limited attention span of the modern Homo Sapiens, try to spread big announcements out with at least a week but preferable a month between major announcements. This includes for example not doing big announcements during the 2 weeks after an openSUSE release. *Contact the team in advance to plan releases!*
writing quality: don't worry. The team will help you. We mostly need a big-as-possible braindump of relevant stuff. It is easier to remove things than to make new 'facts' up ;-)
- What is relevant? Features and what is unique, special about your project/software; changes that impact users and/or other developers; in general, think about what excites YOU about what you do and note those things down!
press: for really 'big' stuff we can send out a press announcement and a pre-announcement. We have quite a few journalists who follow our pre-announcements. By giving them the info about 24-48H BEFORE the release, they can prepare articles and you get a lot more attention. Note that the press on our list has agreed to not publish anything until the agreed time and date.
other things: we'd like to have a screenshot from you - even if it just shows text on a console. Logo's are nice, too, if you don't have one, it would be nice if you could ask the artwork team to come up with something.

See below for an example marketing plan for a (big) release.

Procedure

Fork https://github.com/openSUSE/news-o-o
Create a new markdown file in _posts directory. File name should follow yyyy-mm-dd-title.md format. For example, 2020-02-27-my-first-post.md. You can start by clicking this link.

Write content. You can start with the following template:

   ---
   author: (Name of Author) # please use your real name or team that developed
   date: 2020-02-27 19:27:17+00:00
   layout: post
   license: CC-BY-SA-3.0
   title: My First Post
   image: /wp-content/uploads/(year)/(month)/omw.png   # Place in the correct folder
   categories:
   - Announcements
   tags:
   - infrastructure
   - websites
   ---

Write you post in Markdown and HTML...
The date and time you set here, in the header, will be the date and time your article, once merged, will be published and available on news.opensuse.org. If you set the current day's date, be aware that there might be up to 2 hours delay between the time the PR got accepted and the time it actually gets picked up by the server.
Please use an illustration image with at least 650x400px size. It should be referenced under image in the header above, and the image should be placed in its own directory in /wp-content/uploads/(year)/(month) and named. For example: //wp-content/uploads/2022/04/my-first-post-image.png. If you need help with creating some approriate image feel free to ask in #artwork on IRC, Matrix or Discord.
Save the file and create a pull request. You can find the button at page bottom.

How to join

Just talk to ddemaio ^{Talk - Contributions} or attend a community meeting. You can meet members of the community who are helping at https://t.me/openSUSE_Marketing

Workflow of the team

Scheduling and managing articles

When anybody starts working on an article, either through request from someone (who send you his/her article to be published), mail the news@opensuse.org mailing list to let the rest know. The goal is to let at most 1 article per day go live!

on top of the article, write down the todo and scheduling info. For example:

TODO:

need review from native speaker
need to add images (requested from submitter)

SCHEDULING:

can go live anytime (normal article)

Some (writing) tips for the articles themselves:

Some graphics with an article are highly recommended but not mandatory!
Divide articles in sections with headlines. It makes the text look lighter and easier to follow!
Remember: writing is not something you can or can't do, it simply takes experience and exercise. Also, nobody can make an article perfect the first round. Review is always needed and will almost always improve things, especially if done by a native speaker.

Getting the word out

We should also inform journalists before an important article goes live about something and involve the marketing team to spread the word as well.

Checklist for reviewing an article

Spellchecker (US English)
screenshots or an image
- accessibility of screenshot/image: describe the image literally or describe the intent of the image in the "alternate text" field when you insert it!
don't forget the categories!
proper attribution: put a thank-you on the bottom to thank everyone who helped write it.
Is this an important announcement and should we inform some journalists before?

References