Press Embargoes and The Internet: No Dice?

I think the embargo has more to do with your relationship with the source.

I say publish it Scott...Unless it has National Security implications or it may cause the lose of life or limb..IMHO...

When people trust you, you should honor their trust.

This is the problem of the sender.

In my corporate public relations days, we might send a release at 10 a.m. as we were about to leave the office for a press conference with an embargo until noon, which was easy for broadcast media to honor.

But if someone sends it 72 hours in advance it is almost as if they're hoping it leaks early!

Vic is on target. As a practical matter, a three-day embargo would have been asking a lot in the good old days. Now, the internet being what it is, I believe three days is asking the near impossible.

Mediadog:

I don't know who sent what to Scott but my guess is they're so insecure that the story has no legs when the official time comes that they're using this ploy in the hopes of seeing it post somewhere under the fear of being scooped rule.

From your experience, might you agree?

I replied to the sender my quandary. I said, as "mediadog" says, the chances of the p.r. staying out of the public eye is slim. Would the sender, I asked, reconsider the embargo. I'll keep you...posted?

skf

An embargo is an agreement, like protecting a source. Unless you have made an agreement to embargo material from that source, you have no obligation to do so.

Honor...if you agreed to keep it quiet without strings, then you keep it quiet until the source releases it....

I think what matters most is being someone who keeps their word; in this case, keep the embargo. If it blows up in your face (someone releases early), then you still kept your word, which in the long run will matter more. You will demonstrate (as you have been) that you are someone who can be trusted.

Embargoes were effective when print media was the dominant means of communication, and the source wanted to make everyone feel they were on a level playing field.

The landscape has changed. Embargoes have gone the way of the light table, pica rule and wax machine.

Mike,

Thanks for the memory. I still have a pica pole as a collectable from my olden days in a newsroom. (The glue pot would be kind of messy.)

However, I disagree that embargoes are a thing of the past. But they must be reasonable.

I see no difficulty sending something out midmorning but embargoing release, say, until noon when the local TVers go on air, so the Internet is in sync with them. But anything beyond that is just arrogance. Or, as I suggested above, a duplicitous ploy to try to generate coverage for a story which might have been ignored on its own merits.

Mike -

Thank you. Point of clarification, please. An embargoed press release arrives by email. The correct action by the recipient is to a) ignore the embargo and post the press release at will, or b) at least try first to contact the sender to let them know they can no longer expect embargoes to be honored?

Thank you.

skf

Editor , "B"

The only three day embargo I could understand would be to help weekly newspapers which need the release early to go to press. But that presupposes that they do not update their web site until the official print publication day.

When I edited weeklies -- pre-Internet -- it was not uncommon to get documents and interviews days in advance of an event so that I could get it into print that week. The "embargo" was the agreement to keep the content secret until publication. This applied to me because I did a local radio segment the day we went to press - i.e.: the eve of publication - to hype sales with "Don't miss this week's edition as we report...."(Of course, some things we didn't reveal because we wanted the scoop to be in print before other publications found out.)

When I was at dailies the embargo was hours not days on a full details release. If someone thought they had a hot story, they would contact me verbally to try to entice me to schedule coverage of their press conference but they usually held the content close to the vest.It was not uncommon for flacks to have a third party pitch information so that a story could break early with an "informed sources said..." while they had plausibility to sidestep confirmation.

So I am trying to figure out the reasoning behind this 72-hour advance. Something doesn't make sense. I still hold by the opinion that Scott's source is playing one medium against another in the hopes that it leaks. I wonder if all of this attention is more than the story is worth? I know of several rumors in the political ether but those might be reported in one form or another without an official "embargo" release to goose it along. (I actually have a check-list of rumored stories to see which it is, once reported.)

Information We Don’t Need In Maine
Submitted by Al Diamon on Wed, 02/10/2010 - 2:54pm.

Is the embargo a casualty of the e-media age?

[AMG] editor Scott Fish raised that intriguing question....

My policy has always been to regard embargos as I did requests to go off the record. Before agreeing to either arrangement, I needed to know why. If there was a valid reason – from a journalistic standpoint – I’d hold the information for a short time. If not, tough luck, I’d put it out there.

http://www.downeast.com/media-mutt/2010/february/information-don-need

Now that I see the D'Amboise release (see separate thread), I realize that it wasn't Machiavellian at all; it was amateurism. Editor should have called him and explained the facts-of-life to his naivete and said the hell with the embargo, making it -- in our Fearless President's favorite phrase "a learning experience."

Al Diamon gives AMG mention for raising this interesting journalistic question.
Link

You are talking about what I call "blanket embargos." I hold them in the same regard as someone who says, "I have to tell you something earth-shattering, but you have to promise not to tell anyone."

Clearly, one needs to know what the subject is before making such a promise. And one needs to have agreed to the embargo in order to be held to it.

That said, I honor most of them that come my way, unless they are sent out via bulk email. In that case, it is a law of physics that someone else is going to publish it, and I then contact the originator to let him/her know I'm going to publish.

The editor will remember that I interviewed Paul LePage about a week before he was set to announce. Literally on his way to meet with me that morning, the news was hitting the airwaves. I had agreed, however, to hold it until a set date -- the one he had planned to use to announce. I did not go back on my word. I did, however, call and ask him to reconsider once his pending announcement started being the topic of the day.

I believe that the day of the embargo is gone, as we are now in the day of instant release. It no longer takes days -- or even hours -- to publish. It takes literally minutes. Since there is no reason to pre-release news, I see no reason other than strategic leaks for such a thing.

But the day of honor has not gone, and if one agrees to such a thing, one needs to keep in mind the risk of ignoring the commitment.

Then again, considering the educational system of the past generation or so, perhaps the word simply has too many syllables -- em-bar-go -- and is not understood by all. :)