Comments on: Embargoes Work — Except When They’re Broken

By: mikemike

mikemike — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 02:58:56 +0000

Hahhahahaha. I just loved the “bush league” bit, especially because bush was left in lowercase.

By: Josh Catone

Josh Catone — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 01:12:18 +0000

@Jonathan: I see what you’re saying, but the point of this story was really to give advice to everyone in the embargo process to try to minimize how often this sort of things happens. I’ve received some emails from PR reps saying they’ve taken what I said in this post to heart. So that’s positive, in my opinion. :)

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:51:27 +0000

I don’t get it, aren’t you breaking embargo in a sense and bringing more attention to the story by writing this article? I think you are over-estimating the amount of people that subscribe to every tech news blog out there, and are probably bringing readers to TechCrunch instead of keeping them here by just publishing your post when it was supposed to be published.

It sucks when people don’t follow the widely accepted rules, but the best you can do is post your piece when it is supposed to be posted. Writing this is just shooting yourself in the foot and bringing attention to the fact that you aren’t writing about the story that other people are writing about.

By: anonymous coward2

anonymous coward2 — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:02:23 +0000

It would be very naive to think that print journalists don’t deal with embargoes. Embargoed news is NOT a new concept. It has existed long before bloggers.

In fact it is long time since real journalism has vanished….

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:11:52 +0000

I am fully aware how privileged information and media works and to expect bloggers to be held to an caliber of professional journalism is a joke. Its the internet and you need to take it a little less seriously.

By: Josh Catone

Josh Catone — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 02:37:27 +0000

@Anonymous Coward: It would be very naive to think that print journalists don’t deal with embargoes. Embargoed news is NOT a new concept. It has existed long before bloggers.

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:40:17 +0000

That’s why online journalism is not real journalism

By: Josh Catone

Josh Catone — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:28:09 +0000

@Alan Actually, adequate lead time on an embargo helps bloggers not to just rehash the press release (at least, it does for those who put some effort into it). Embargoes give us a chance to be briefed on the news ahead of time and then have a chance to sit back and evaluate it, digest, analyze without having to worry someone will beat us to the punch (because lets face it: blogs are driven by ads, ads are sold on page views, and scoops (can) drive page views).

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:42:42 +0000

I get all my tech stories through RSS feeds, like slashdot, digg, reddit, etc. When an embargo breaks, my feed is immediately flooded with the same reprints of the PR package from all of these same old sources. I flip through them without hardly a second glance. In effect, reprinting their PR package is worthless to me, as I’m sure it is to most readers.

However, if you have a unique perspective on the item, I will read it no matter if the PR packaged news came out of embargo two weeks ago.

Why do I want to use it? How will this help me? Answer these REAL questions for me instead of crying about not being able to publish the same facts from the same Press release at the same time as everyone else…

If all you are doing is rehashing the press release, save us ALL some time and find something else to post about…