News team processes

[Nathan Handler]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 4:15 AM, Daniel Holbach
<daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I have a few questions and hope you could help me answer them.

I would be glad to try.

>  * Where do you publish the UWN apart from the Fridge, the Wiki and
>   some mailing lists?

When it comes time to publish, we make full copies of each issue
available on the wiki, forum, and ubuntu-news mailing list. However,
we also take advantage of some other communication media to advertise
the new releases. Announcements about each new newsletter (along with
a link) are sent to ubuntu-news-team, loco-contacts, and
ubuntu-translators mailing lists, posted in certain IRC channels,
posted on the fridge (this version also includes some additional info
such as the contents and contributors), dented/tweeted, and
occasionally posted on Facebook.

>  * How many people are regularly involved?

The number of people varies from week-to-week. Some issues (especially
those that are held off until the very last minute) are produced with
only one or two people. However, I'd say that on average, there are
about 4-6 people working on each issue. This allows people to work on
finding and organizing stories, writing summaries, editing, and
publishing (in addition to some other tasks).

>  * How many (external) news submissions do you regularly have?

We don't get that many news submissions. We tend to go through the
announcement mailing list archives and rely on a large collection of
blogs for this. Most of the submissions that we do receive are from
well-established Ubuntu teams that are running through a list of
post-meeting action items (which for most, include sending minutes to
ubuntu-news-team).

>  * Is the mailing list mainly used for this? Or the Google doc?

Submissions are usually sent to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list. We
then use a mix of Etherpad, Google Docs, and the Wiki to sort the
submissions into categories and write summaries.

>
> Thanks in advance.

I hope this helps.

Nathan