As you can imagine, Google and Microsoft embargoed news doesn’t break early. The few times they’ve had problems they’ve chosen the nuclear option and banned the offender for as much as a year. Their embargoes don’t break because they’d unleash hell on the offender. One is Waggener Edstrom, who handles PR for Microsoft. You get a slap on the wrist, and you break another embargo later that day. The PR firm gets upset but they don’t stop working with the offending publication or writer. The reason this is becoming a larger problem is because there is no downside to breaking embargoes. We can’t continue to operate under these rules.
Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more. That means it’s a race to the bottom by new sites, who are increasingly stressed themselves with a competitive marketplace and decreasing advertising sales.Ī year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first. The benefits are clear – sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more.
It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.īut there’s a problem. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. Instead, PR firms have pre-briefed us on the news and have asked us to write, if we choose to, no earlier than a set time.Ī lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. They aren’t stories that we’ve dug up ourselves. Others, like Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson, have been more public with their frustration.īut now a new problem has emerged that we won’t ignore.Ī portion of the stories we write are “embargoed” news items. If we say we won’t write a story (which is most of the time), things often turn nasty (check out Lois Whitman at HWH PR/New Media for a fine example).įor the most part we’ve dealt with the problem quietly over the last couple of years, other than the occasional lashing out on Twitter. Today, PR firms email a story to us as many as 20 times, and call every TechCrunch writer on their cell phones repeatedly. Gone are the days of polite pitches and actual relationship building. That in turn means that PR firms hammer us to get us to write about their clients. Tech companies are desperate for press and hammering their PR firms for coverage on blogs and major media sites. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos.
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