Dealing with the Press

HI Evan - thanks for the measured response. I dont' think anyone was actually "attacking" your profession - and of course Journalism is not only a Porfession, it is one of the bulwarks of Democracy all over the world - a free press goes with a free people. Ok - Red/White/Blue soapbox - pretty K3WL, no? Speaking as a one-time (amateur) jounnalist - I published, by hand, by myself, the base newspaper for the Army unit I was attached to for a year or so, and I have many articles and papers published, including ongoing columns in magazines... but mainly speaking as a Consumer of the journalistic profession, in that I have been interviewed in print and video meida many, many times... it has been my personal experience, that, notwithstanding my efforts to simplfy, concretize, and present material in the format that I know it will be reproduced in (IE using my own small journalist-type experience) - still the majority of those pieces contained errors ranging from poor-detail-grasp to gross distortions of an incomprehensible nature - as if the reporter talked with me, wrote down (and sometimes recorded our conversation) and then got completely falling-down wasted before filing the copy - I dunno. I have a laot of them clipped - I'll show ya sometime. Even the magazine articles I wrote, though the editor was a technically-oriented person - and we proofread zealously - 'things' would just happen - paragraphs would get out of order - he'd paraphrase me when he had no idea what he was talking about (I'm not commmenting on his language or orthography skills here)... So my experiences over the last twenty years boils down to: "They always get something wrong" and it's heartbreaking when you're trying to do something good, like promote our endeavors with classic computers, and your own words get 'processed' and the resulting article conveys something utterly alien to what you meant. Of course, maybe you could ask for a retraction, but... it's too late at that point, and the issues I generally deal with do not warrant such. I am sorry you took offense - and I was one of the first responders to the original message, and I *knew* I was probably going to offend the several of us who work in the field - but my intention was to try and convey to someone who had no experience with these matters, the best way to handle an interview of that kind. I was afraid, as well, that the subtext of the original poster's interview was going to be 'ridicule the wacko' instead of 'promote the preservation of legacy computing' All this of course is just my 200 millidollar Cheers (and again, thanks!) JOhn