event-press-relations

Event Press Relations

You pursue coverage the event does not control and cannot trade for. Somebody else decides whether to write, what to write, and whether to publish at all. That asymmetry is the whole skill.

Make a "yes" cheap for a journalist or a creator to give. Make two irreversible failures less likely:

• A refusal that becomes a public dispute.
• A statement that cannot be unsaid.

Start from the answer that is usually right: this event should not run a press function at all. Two major developer-community events have no press accreditation policy.

• PyCon US has no current published press page, only a defunct 2013 one.
• FOSDEM requires no registration at all - "You don't need to register. Just turn up and join in!" - so "press access" there has no mechanism to grant or deny.

Read that as precedent, not as a gap they forgot to fill.

What this skill owns, and what siblings own instead

• Barter is not earned coverage. A two-way visibility exchange with a newsletter, podcast or community - logo for blurb, no cash - belongs to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-media-partnerships, which draws the same line from its side: earned coverage is "a one-way ask the event neither controls nor reciprocates". The moment something is promised back in return for words, hand the task over.
• On-site press handling belongs here. samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-vip-management routes it to this skill, which "claims accreditation, embargoes and on-site press handling", while that one keeps only "a guest's own exposure to press". Claim the press room, the interview logistics and the shooting rules; hand back any question about one named guest's own photograph.
• The event's own channels are not press. Posting the lineup on the event's accounts is samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-social-media. Buying reach for it is samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-marketing-plan, whose channel menu carries a deliberately lightweight "pre-event press" rung and defers a real campaign here.
• Attendee photo and recording consent is an access mechanism, not a press rule. The colour-coded interaction-consent stickers (red: not interested in talking, or in being photographed) belong to samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-accessibility-inclusion, which owns whether they exist and how many. samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-code-of-conduct owns one adjacent line - "Harassing photography or recording." - and nothing else about consent. This skill owns only what press are told about the mechanism, and how it is enforced against a credential.

Policies change yearly and by edition, and staleness carries across every edition you copy from. Web Summit's accreditation page itself reads "Last updated: October 2020". Re-check any policy before adopting its wording.

Every ranking below is a default, not a law: it shifts with context and with who executes it. Re-rank all four menus after the interview, against what you already know about this organizer. Each of the following overturns a default rung:

• A team member who is a working journalist.
• An outlet that already covered a past edition.
• A keynote speaker whose name is itself the news.
• A venue with a spare room.

Interview

Ask one question at a time, multiple-choice where possible. Questions 6-8 exist because the menus diverge sharply on time-to-effect, durability and effort. Nobody can pick those three defaults for the organizer.

1. Does any outlet, newsletter, podcast or independent creator cover this event's subject at this scale - name them. If nothing can be named, that answer alone decides Menu A.
2. Is registration meeting its curve without earned coverage? (Together with Q1 this is the promotion condition for pursuing no press at all.)
3. Community-run or vendor/company-run, and does any sponsor plan to make its own product news at this event? (Sponsor product news is what forces an embargo posture the organizer does not control.)
4. In-person, online-only or hybrid, how many days, and is a spare room or a quiet corner available? (Online-only deletes both physical rungs on Menu C.)
5. Expected attendance this edition, and last edition's figure if there was one.
6. What is the next calendar beat you would actually announce - CFP, lineup, programme, on-sale, day-of, wrap-up - and its date? Which of them is genuinely news rather than a page going live?
7. Is this one edition's push, or a relationship you want to compound across editions? (A compounding mandate promotes the slow rungs: a warm outlet list, a pre-brief relationship.)
8. What is the effort ceiling - organizer hours, how many comped seats you can spare, and who is willing to be the single voice on the record?
9. Has anyone ever been refused a press pass here, and how was it handled? (A refusal already in the past changes Menu B's default immediately.)
10. Is the event free and uncapped, or ticketed with a capacity?

Community-run vs vendor-run

Ownership is the axis that moves rungs.

• Community-run. PyCon US and FOSDEM publish no accreditation policy at all, and DEF CON runs the lightest interview model there is: "If you are interested in connecting with a speaker for an interview the best process is to reach out to them directly". Lighter rungs are precedent here, not budget constraint.
• Vendor/company-run. Sponsors and the organizer both make product news, which forces an embargo posture and a brokered-interview expectation. CNCF-scale events "actively work with media and analyst partners to schedule briefings ahead of and during the conference".

Name which pole a recommendation assumes whenever the two differ.

Workflow

1. Run the interview. Q1 and Q2 come first: a "nobody" plus a healthy registration curve ends this skill at Menu A's opt-out rung, and every step after it is wasted.
2. Set the press posture (Menu A). If it is no press function, say so, name where the residual exposure lives - the incident path itself is samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-code-of-conduct's - and stop.
3. Build the media page before writing any policy, because the policy links to it. Keep it ungated: on large conferences' media pages every element downloads with no registration. Contents checklist, boilerplate rules, brand-asset rules and the past-edition stats that carry an event's credibility: references/press-kit-and-calendar.md.
4. Write the accreditation policy (Menu B) in plain language, and publish the refusal path with it. Eligibility wording, the proof stack, comp policy, caps and how to refuse without creating a dispute: references/accreditation-policy.md.
5. Peg announcements to the calendar beats (same reference as step 3). Treat the lineup/schedule reveal as the single highest-leverage earned-media moment of the year, and plan it as a dedicated press moment rather than a page update. Once the contact list is long enough to repay the effort, add two refinements:
   • Note against each outlet what it actually publishes: a desk that reprints a plain numbers release, versus one that needs a market or economy angle with data attached. The pitch is then tailored once rather than re-guessed per send.
   • Offer one outlet or creator an early, exclusive angle ahead of the blanket release, instead of treating every recipient identically.
6. Set the embargo posture (Menu D) against Q3 and Q6 - sponsor product news is the usual reason a posture is forced on you.
7. Set the on-site depth (Menu C) and write the shooting rule before doors, naming what press may film, where, and what the attendee opt-out mechanism is. Press-room specifics, both interview models and the recording rules: references/onsite-and-crisis.md.
8. Designate one spokesperson and one backup, and brief everyone else that they do not speak to press. Same reference: the four crisis cases and the five principles synthesized from them.
9. After the edition, harvest the stats into next year's fact sheet, and read each outlet and creator for whether they published at all.
10. Present section by section - posture, media page, accreditation policy, calendar, embargo posture, on-site, spokesperson - and get explicit approval per section before finalizing.

If your harness has persistent memory, record per edition:

• The posture and why.
• Who was accredited and who was refused, with the reason.
• Which beats were pitched and to whom.
• Who actually published.
• Every policy quoted, with the date it was checked.

Next edition starts from that instead of re-deriving a policy from other events' pages.

Menu A - press posture

How much press function exists at all, before any specific journalist appears.

• effort (organizer hours, standing ownership, published policy, briefing): dedicated press function > staged build > reactive contact only > no press function
• value (earned coverage that reaches the audience this event needs): dedicated press function > staged build > reactive contact only > no press function
• compliance cost (review triggered, reversibility spent): dedicated press function > staged build > reactive contact only == no press function
• efficiency: reactive contact only > staged build > dedicated press function > no press function

Value and effort run in the same order here, so no pair of rungs can put higher value against lower effort. None of the six pairs yields a strict-dominance relation, and the check finds nothing because it cannot: this menu is clean by construction, not by care, and that is not a pass.

With value rank-identical to effort rank, the efficiency line collapses into cheapest-first among the rungs that buy anything, which is the one ordering a ranking exists to improve on. It therefore rests entirely on each rung's own argument below. A reader who disagrees with one of those arguments has nothing mechanical to appeal to.

The compliance == is argued, and it is the one axis carrying information. A reactive contact publishes no criterion anyone can be refused against, and puts one briefed person on the record. No press function publishes nothing either, but the statement still gets made by whichever volunteer is standing nearest the reporter, and it is exactly as unretractable: equal exposure, one assigned and one not.

• Reactive contact only - the default. A named press contact and a boilerplate paragraph on the site: answer what comes in, initiate nothing, and name the single voice that speaks while everyone else is briefed to say nothing. That designation costs one sentence and covers the one failure that cannot be reversed, which is why the rung leads on efficiency while buying almost no proactive coverage. Promotion condition: move up one rung when Q6 names a beat that is genuinely news - a keynote whose name is itself the story, a first edition, a venue or format change - and Q1 named at least one outlet or creator who has covered this subject before.
• Staged build - an ungated media page, a two-lane eligibility policy, and announcements mapped onto the annual calendar. A growing community event lands here, and most of the material in this skill gets used at this rung.
• Dedicated press function - the starved rung: top of value, top of effort, top of compliance cost, so efficiency never picks it. Promotion condition: the event exceeds roughly 500–1,000 attendees - a self-set graduation band, not a measured threshold - or Q3 says vendor sponsors are making their own product news at it. The second trigger fires far more often than the first at a small vendor event.
• No press function - nothing published, nobody designated, press treated as ordinary attendees. Last on efficiency, because near-zero effort buying nothing on the axis being measured is a ratio of zero. Promoted to first outright when Q1 names nobody who covers this subject at this scale and Q2 says registration meets its curve without earned coverage - the most common right answer for a community technical event, with direct precedent in both PyCon US and FOSDEM.
  • Every rung above it then manufactures a press function for an audience of nobody. The residual incident exposure does not vanish: the reporting and response path is samber/dev-event-organizer-skills@event-code-of-conduct's, and what is absent is only a press-facing voice nobody is asking for.
• Deleted when Q8 says nobody is willing to be the single voice on the record: the dedicated press function. Delete it from this menu and from the axis lines above. A press operation whose spokesperson slot is empty produces a press conference answered by whoever is nearest, which is the failure the whole rung was bought to prevent.

Menu B - accreditation breadth

Who gets a credential, and against what published bar.

• effort (policy drafting, per-application screening, refusal handling): outlets plus creators with a stated bar > traditional outlets only > open > none
• value (coverage reaching the developer audience, from people who will actually publish): outlets plus creators with a stated bar > open > traditional outlets only > none
• compliance cost (review triggered, reversibility spent): traditional outlets only == outlets plus creators with a stated bar > open > none
• efficiency: open > outlets plus creators with a stated bar > traditional outlets only > none

Dominance check - clean by care. Value and effort disagree on exactly one of the six pairs, which yields one strict-dominance relation: open beats traditional outlets only on value while costing less effort. The efficiency line has to place open above it, and it does. The other five pairs have value and effort rising together, so a ratio decides them rather than dominance.

State that one relation out loud, because it runs against instinct. A proof-heavy journalists-only policy at a developer event loses on both halves at once:

• On value, it excludes by definition the constituency that most reliably reaches developers.
• On effort, it costs more to administer than letting everyone in, because every application must be screened against a proof stack.

The compliance == is argued. Both lettered rungs publish a criterion that a refused applicant can quote back publicly, and neither refusal can be un-made once they post about it. Adding a creator lane doubles the paperwork, not the class of exposure.

This menu starves nothing, and that is a finding rather than an omission. The usual casualty of an efficiency order is the rung that tops both value and effort, since it loses every round. Here the value leader (outlets plus creators with a stated bar) also leads on effort, yet still finishes second on efficiency, close enough to the default that the promotion condition below reaches it in one step.

Nothing on this menu is both worth havin

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