The End of the Embargo

Companies and PR agencies have always tried to control the timing and flow of news stories by using the Embargo technique. It’s pretty standard practice and ensures, among other things, that news can be broken to publications with longer leadtimes (like monthly publications) to ensure that they can feature news at the same time as competitors who get to market quicker.

With the introduction of 24 hour news cycles and online (and therefore instant) publication, the use of Embargoes arguably became even more critical to ensure that publications had a level playing field. After all, without an Embargo, we have to think very carefully who we speak to first, as they will be the publication who gets the scoop, making it less likely that their competitors will bother to cover the issue – and certainly not with the same prominence or enthusiasm.

Finally, with the arrival of blogs and their fierce competition to break new stories, there’s considerable uncertainty about where we stand and the validity of the embargo at all. TechCrunch, for example, declared last December that they would no longer honour embargoes at all, with the justification that when they played nice, some other site didn’t and scooped them anyway. As Michael Arrington wrote:

 Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every
embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll
just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo
by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.

 

No one can say that we weren’t warned. And if you’re in technology, you can’t exactly sanction these important players, unless (as Michael Arrington hinself points out), you’re a mega-player like Google or Microsoft, where a future news buoycott would actually hurt the publication itself.

I’ve been exploring the implications of this with our UK PR agency, Speed Communications and its Managing Director Stephen Waddington, who can see at first hand how PR and especially Tech PR has changed so much in the last few years. Stephen agrees that one of the major causes of problems has been some PR agencies’ tendency to spam everyone they can think of with a story, rather than relying on more traditional skills of developing relationships with key, relevant journalists on a one-on-one basis.

“The PR industry is moving wholesale to the discipline of the financial markets whereby news is managed by a small team and kept under strict wraps until the break date and then distributed to all audiences at the same time.” Says Waddington.

Certainly the trend is more developed in the US currently, though it is coming this way quickly. Soon media embargoes are going to feel as quaint Grub Street and hot metal printing.