The End of Embargoes?

Michael Arrington wrote a piece on TechCrunch today that proclaims the "Death of the Embargo":

"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... One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first."

But the digital world means that embargoes have long been dead in this PR specialism.

Bloggers don't work 9 til 5 - well, not on their blogs anyway. Most of them will have day jobs with all of the responsibility that entails and so will only get the chance to blog in their spare time. This means that they just don't have time to sit and wait on an embargo.

If they do get paid to write for a blog or online news site, they are getting paid to get the news first. In the world where a hit on Digg can increase traffic by ridiculous amounts, or - as Arrington points out - being the first to break a story to gets you on the front page of TechMeme and another substantial increase in traffic, it is against the journalist's best interests to wait on an embargo, especially if they know that another publication is getting the same story with the same embargo.

As anyone who has seen Will Ferrell's Talledega Nights will know, "If you're not first, you're last".

This isn't a solution, but if a PR agency wanted to get their clients on a wide range of blogs and online news sites, they wouldn't bother with an embargo - ever. Instead, they should spend time on actually making their announcements newsworthy and targeted at the right publications, time that would have otherwise been spent explaining to journalists and bloggers what the embargo was. This means that the journalist will want to break the story before anyone else and therefore you'll get a range of publications who are actually interested the news writing a piece on it.

But Arrington does give an exception for when embargoes will be honoured:

"We will honor embargoes from trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful of people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes."

So the solution is to build up a trusted relationship with the journalists and bloggers that you are conducting outreach to and give them a strong story so that they can guarantee that the news will be of interest to their readers. Isn't this the case with traditional journalism? When did the rules change for digital PR?

Newsworthy announcements given to journalists that you have built trusted relationships with. Just because embargoes may now be extinct, it doesn't mean that the basic rules of PR are.

There's more excellent discussion on this subject in the comments of the original post and over at Mahalo. Drew Benvie also covers the post here (complete with reference to grey hairs!) and Brian Solis gives an insider's perspective here.

Update: Jonathan Hopkins pointed out this delightful little site this morning, The Embargo Killer.