Reporting New and Suppressed Information is What Journalism is All About
Needs sunlight
Spreading the word already spread by others may have value, but not much value. Take the recent news about SUSE. Only one site actually reported something new. That was Reuters. It managed to get some insider information and then transmitted it in its official site. Soon afterwards we caught 7 more sites speaking about the same thing, but none of them offered anything new (except maybe some disposable opinions and analysis).
For sites to matter they need to have sources. For sites to have sources they need to establish a clear track record of source protection, at the very least.
In recent years a lot of journalists perished or lost their jobs. This is why companies like IBM and Microsoft can get away with silent layoffs, i.e. layoffs that almost nobody mentions or reports on. In the case of Red Hat - not SUSE - we're meant to think everything goes on as usual, even if whistleblowers tell us a completely different story: IBM is killing Red Hat.
In the domain of Free software, there are very few sites out there that offer exclusive coverage on community affairs and there are many gagging/censorship attempts. Overcoming the culture of suppression of speech (a CoC is part of it) is crucial for accountability. For instance, we recently learned that the OSI's chief actually left in protest; the OSI had become corporate front group that censors and libels critics, even tries to deplatform them (we'll cover this in the future). More recently I received physical threats and similar threats were sent to my family [1, 2]. The public needs to know about and speak about these sorts of things. █
Image source: Orbs and rainbows circling the sun in Nuremberg, 1580.