I've been hacking out a living as a freelance journalistworking from home for the past year, since the job of CTO for a local ISP went titsup and the market went into a nosedive. I'm lucky; I've got a cable modem. But I work on linux boxes -- mostly a year or two behind the state of the art curve -- and your crappy Word 2002 document or PowerDrool presentation is SOL if you want me to write about your product.
Nor am I going to fill out six zillion registration forms in order to spend two hours searching your PR stacks in the hope of pulling a single quote. That takes Time, and Time is Money.
I also get pissed off when PR people keep playing musical chairs. The PR people at Corel on the Linux side were great -- until they downsized three in a row and I lost track of who I was talking to.
Nor do I want to subscribe to a generic email announcement list. For some reason O'Reilly mailshot me whenever theyannounce a Windows title ... a fat lot of use, seeing that I'm the UK's only goddamn full-time 100% no-shit eat-your- own-dogfood freelance LINUX journalist.
If you want to see a _real_ example of stupid mailing listtricks, look here: