Embargo-a-go-go

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has dropped a big bomb on the world of pub­lic rela­tions by declar­ing that TC will no longer honor embar­goes from PR firms. (There are caveats, of course. If the news is exclu­sive to TC or if you on on a very short list of favorite flacks, you’ll still get your embargo honored.)

The ratio­nale, Arrington writes, is that no other media out­lets really honor embar­goes any­how, mak­ing them worth­less, defeat­ing their pur­pose. That by itself wouldn’t be so bad, but he points out that the world of PR is so com­pet­i­tive that most firms can’t afford to hand out any neg­a­tive con­se­quences for break­ing an embargo. The flacks just go right back to work with the same peo­ple who just broke their embargo, maybe with a few sharp words, but that’s it. In Arrington’s words:

We’ve never bro­ken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. 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.

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.

I more or less work in pub­lic rela­tions, but my sit­u­a­tion is odd. I work for a uni­ver­sity news ser­vice, mean­ing that I’m half reporter and half flack. In my time at the ser­vice, we have never issued an embargo, but the ser­vice has hon­ored the embar­goes set by aca­d­e­mic jour­nals when they pub­lish our faculty’s papers. Really, for the world of aca­d­e­mic news, reten­tion and uni­ver­sity recruit­ing — my world — Arrington’s line in the sand approach won’t have much of an effect, rip­ple or influ­en­tial or otherwise.

But I thought it was worth post­ing about, since Arrington’s announce­ment has set off a small firestorm of com­ments on TC and dozens of other sites.

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