Any suggestions how to get that ideal "steady stream of low-level publicity"?

I don't really know. Social news sites and peoples' blogs seem like good ways to get this steady drip. If we got a link on front pages of Reddit or Hacker News every few days, that might be enough.

And what do you think about my idea of suggesting a story idea to one of the reporters (I think he tends to write multi-page feature stories)? If he actually took up the suggestion (which I admit, given what Vladimir_M said, is a big if), would that be an overall positive or negative?

It depends on the spin. The Seigenthaler incident was so bad because it was completely negative and seemed to traumatize the higher-ups. They ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, doing something, anything to tell the press that 'we're fixing things!' And this lead to a general climate where BLPs are treated extremely harshly by Foundation diktat, which has in turn fostered a general highly negative attitude to new content, content you wouldn't find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and anything not impeccably sourced.

(For example, page creation was turned off. Supposedly statistics were being collected to see whether it helped. Wales finally admitted in the Signpost a few years ago that they were lying through their teeth, no statistics were or are being collected, and the decision was never going to be reversed. I don't know what others think of Wales, but that was a breathtaking example of why I trust him and the Foundation as far as I can throw them and have never donated since.)

If the spin is 'here's a great site with lots of fascinating things to read', maybe that wouldn't be so bad. If it's more like 'look at these dangerous low-status techy fantasists'...