What Happens When A Reporter Breaks A Press Embargo
Hardware reviewer Dan Rutter linked to our bit about press embargoes, "which in the computer world manifests itself in those sudden snowstorms of online reviews that show up for each new piece of PC gear, all on the same day and nearly on the same hour." He writes:
There are, as the Consumerist piece makes clear, some perfectly valid reasons for embargoes to exist. But they're mainly just another way for the makers of news to control the journalistic process, just as the precious gift of "access" prevents journalists at White House press conferences these days from saying... well, anything much.Dan says that he broke a press embargo back in 2000 when Intel sent a computer with a then new P4 chip inside to his news organization's sales department. The ad sales guy didn't know what to do with it and Dan ended up with the computer, but not apparently the cover letter containing the embargo language. Dan decided to run ahead with a review, posting it a few hours before everyone else.
Interestingly, in the ensuing, "moderate amount of hell [that] broke loose," the locus of outrage wasn't Intel, but other journalists, who castigated him and blacklisted him from ever being linked, until they forgot about it years later and began linking him again. — BEN POPKEN
Embargoes, NDAs, and loopholes [How To Spot A Psycopath]
(Image: Stu Shepard)
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Comments:
News? I mostly see commercials on the TV.
Intel needs to get over itself. Bravo to this guy for not paying attention to their stupid whining. Boo to this guy for kowtowing and taking the story down.
Anything you send to someone unsolicited is theirs and if they tell people about it, you should just suck it up. Don't want them to tell people about it before a certain date? Don't send it to them til then.
@swalve: not really. its all control of information. one might be considered vastly more important, but thats a value judgement. we both know there are people, surfing this site, for whom news of the next apple product is far more significant than news of 20 soldiers being kidnapped and tortured, or china launching a moonshot, and all three will be embargoed by their respective organisations.
Most companies think that news embargos for a product rollout, recall, earnings, and other news items are the most important things in the world. They protect them and are careful with who receives them. If you consider that a news embargo has the ability to raise or lower a stock, many people would love to know about the news before it was leaked to the masses.
swalve- I really agree with you on this one. What the companies are doing is making the jouranlists jobs easier. The company provides them with products for free, education events and "insider" information .
In return the author is expected to write an article and wait to post print it.
If the author doesn't wish to abide by embargos the only thing the companies can do is stop providing all of those free services to assist the author.
Companies hope that their products recieve positive reviews but there is no set requirement for positive reviews. So long as the the review if factual, reasonable fair and the company isn't crooked the relationship will continue even of a major product is panned.
Most journalists don't seem to have a problem with this. Their job is made easier as long as they simply wait. This also allows more time for fact checking, better story timing etal.
Bloggers are crippled by this. Blogs tend to be near verbatum reguritation of press releases and rumors. A blog,especially tech, that looses access to advance information is screwed. The internet will be done with the story before they get a chance to post. They also have the most to gain in terms of page hits, thus revenue, for breaking a juicy story first.
@Buran: Intel didn't give they guy issue about this. They simply asked for the artilce to be brought down until embargo time was reached.
from the article"
Intel (or at least their PR people) weren't actually noticeably upset about the whole thing, so it would have been churlish to turn it into a big argument."
So really all of your bluster is misplaced.
and you guys are forgetting about the big one, automotive embargoes with Jalopnik et al keeping track of which publication is busting which embargo in search of inflated web traffic numbers.
For me its more of screwing the other journalists that bothers me. They didn't actually get any scoop, they just broke an embargo that was being kept by others.
From a Beltway reporter: Embargoes have been around forever, as far as I know. The one I see the most is the president's weekly radio address (text released on Friday afternoon/evening, but can't be used until 10:06 am on Saturday). But you also sometimes get embargoed speeches or speech excerpts, etc.
This is a great point: "Companies hope that their products recieve positive reviews but there is no set requirement for positive reviews." In fact, it takes away some of the deadline pressure that can mean not getting the opposing/balancing view in the story, or not having time in the case of a product review to dig really deep into the product in question. You have more time to research, more time to call up other sources, etc. That's almost never good for the embargoing party. On the other hand, they can prepare for the coverage, get their PR ducks in a row, have their allies prepped, etc.
There's another dimension to this, which is that you can always call other sources and get the information in a non-embargoed way. If the White House says, under embargo, that the President is going to meet with the Pope, you can always ring up a source at the State Department to get non-embargoed confirmation. The embargo doesn't mean "you can't write about this at all." It means "you cannot use this information, as provided by us, until this specific time."
I suspect that the reason Rutter got guff from other hacks is that they were ticked off at getting beat and lashed out at him. They may also have been worried that this would mean the end of embargoed news. That's also why they forgot about it so quickly.
Isn't there a GIANT difference between the embargo of product releases and the embargo of actual news?