The death of the “press embargo”
If any of you deal with the technology press, i.e. want them to publish stories on your stuff, you may know about the concept of a “press embargo”, where you send them info and say “don’t release this until X date”. Last night at a panel I found out some interesting info about this.
These used to exist and be widely used. They let a company manage the time at which it’s “big news” would come out, and it let reporters have some extra time to prepare their story and make it higher-quality without risking being out of date.
However, lately the whole thing has broken down. TechCrunch and the Wall St. Journal, in particular, have been undermining the “gentleman’s agreement” that made this work. A tech jouralist now has to assume that by following the embargo, he or she will end up being out of date (“scooped” is apparently not really a term-of-art any more). In general, journalists do not like them, and will not honor any that is more than one week out. They worry that someone else will discover the news and not have agreed to the embargo, or the news will leak some other way, or someone will just ignore the embargo. Also, some journalists now consider them just too problematic and too much trouble and ignore embargoed press releases entirely.
So, take this into account if you were thinking of doing an embargo’ed press release.
The panel session was called “An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Bootstrapping PR”. It was at last night’s Web Innovator’s Group meeting, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA. The panelists were excellent.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Meh. If you don’t have lead time, you just have to make sure you understand the material and its implications before you publish. If you don’t, you look like an idiot. If you look like an idiot too often, people stop reading your news.
I fail to see how end users getting news earlier and getting a built-in filtering system for crap journalism as a by-product is a bad thing. We desperately need a filter for crap journalism.
September 30th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
In other subfields of journalism such as health, though, embargos are thriving. Break an embargo imposed by the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, and they’ll cut you off from their PR for a graduated period. Do it too many times, and they’ll ban you from their advance list permanently. That can be crippling for a medical journalist.
The reason, of course, is that the NEJM is itself a news outlet, and doesn’t care to be scooped by the people it’s sending advance notice to. So the embargo is set for the same day as the journal’s publication date. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was common elsewhere in science as well.
October 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I’ve never been a fan of the embargo, but they do serve a purpose. I think the panelists (as the organizations you mentioned) are reacting to the overuse of the term. Young PR people are taught to put the term at the top of nearly any release they write, which isn’t what it’s for.
I try to only tell reporters news will be on a particular date, unless it is so sensitive that it requires more care, as with an announcement that has a regulatory bent or involves a partner company that may pull out if it’s announced too early.
There have been times in the past when other publications set “no embargo” rules, but we often found that individual reporters would accept them if they truly wanted the information or were very interested in the company, but would pull out the “no embargo” language if they felt they were being played.