Posts Tagged ‘embargo’
Thus begins the first day of my holiday season, and it was made even more special with a brand new LAPTOP!
Woo hoo!!!
Who says holidays are just for kids? I love Santa.
On a not so related note (but related to an earlier post), I received a copy of a link to this post by David-George Cosh. I thought it was very thoughtful, and definitely fair.
http://strangehold.com/blog/?p=18
Is the embargo really necessary?
Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington has widely announced his complete reluctance to deal with embargoed information. Is he right? Maybe.
Although I’m going to try to write a story reflecting what the PR firms I deal with think about this issue, let’s assume Arrington is absolutely right.
Some firms will stop talking to us (yeah! less email), but we’ll find other ways to get the news. Others, who haven’t read this post because they don’t read TechCrunch, will be unpleasantly surprised. Maybe if we cause enough pain then PR firms will start to take action against those publications who break the rules.
Embargoes are really widely used to curry some special favour with journalists who promise coverage in exchange for a certain level of exclusivity or timed media coverage. Personally, I love embargoes but would say I’ve actually engaged in them roughly two-thirds of the time. It’s always a nice break to be granted something in advance so I can walk, not run, to the editor, have a leisurely chat, not a rushed one, and decide if this is something I’d cover.
Although I really don’t get embargoes that much, I’ve also never, ever broke them and will never understand why someone would break a promise to report on it ahead of schedule. Call me a professional, but there’s to do otherwise is highly unethical, which is why I’m not applauding Arrington wholeheartedly here.
Arrington also describes the actions of one Lois Whitman, who appears to spam her targets with her PR pitches to the point of complete annoyance. Based on the evidence presented in that blog post, I’d say it’s a fairly easy to throw the rulebook out of the window. I’ve dealt with a few Lois Whitman’s myself and frankly, it’s easy for these types of PR professionals to be lumped with their peers into the single annoying flack category. As some of my colleagues would like to point out, this has made me very frustrated, something I hope people would understand given the amount of pitches I get daily.
The problem, as PR blogger Brian Solis says, is two fold. One is opportunistic bloggers or reporters looking for an edge will break a story ahead of the agreed-upon embargo and the other is just PR firms leveraging the embargo while privately knowing that the “scheduled” wire broadcast time isn’t that important anyways.
Hopefully, the outcome of Arrington’s lead could be a decidingly shift in how PR works with blogs and the mainstream media. If this concept of ignoring the embargo begins to take off, this will undoubtedly create a shift in how coverage is awarded to certain organizations. Will this make the reporters job harder? I’d like to hope not. But it might help the whole process between PR and reporters better.
Even though I’m not a blog writer (although I’m sure one day that will happen), the embargo will always be a welcome tool to my coverage. But it shouldalways, always, always be up to the PR rep to have an understanding of how the media works and what makes a good story will always win out in the end, something I rarily have seen during my experience with PR folk.
Trust and relationship building, as Allen Stern notes, is certainly part of the equation, but if Arrington’s ways catch on and PR folk can’t rely on their most powerful weapon in their arsenal anymore, I can only hope that the only outcome of this movement will force blanketing of cut-and-pasted pitches to die a welcome death.
