Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

Okay, it’s 10:30pm on Sunday of the slowest news week of the year, and the day before Labor Day (so I expect–and hope–you’re off enjoying your weekend instead of reading a blog post). But, saw this great post by Marshall Kilpatrick explaining the why’s and how’s of embargoes (succinct, accurate, and well thought out) so I thought I’d pass it on. For you to read Tuesday morning.

I’d add a few more tips:

Don’t ask us to embargo, but give an exclusive to someone else for early release.

If you’re going to release info early to anyone else — be it the mainstream press, a blogger, etc. — don’t ask any publication to hold to an embargo. This is particularly prevalent in the case of the “DEMO” style conferences, which seem to insist that startups not pre-announce what they are going to show at the conferences. That’s fine, but AFTER you’ve announced what you do and shown everything at the conference, don’t expect people to hold that when there are 25 other press people at the conference writing up an article, too. We also often hear from very naive startups who think that in order to get ANY press, they have to give an exclusive to a blog. You’ll get press/attention if your startup/news is interesting, NOT if you promise secret favors to bloggers.

Don’t try to embargo news you’ve posted already on your web site.

This is just asinine, but you’d be amazed how often this happens.

Once an embargo is blown, it’s blown.

In this day and age of news aggregators, RSS readers, and more, if someone blows your embargo, consider it blown and just release the info. There’s such a wide distribution of info from blogs now, if the news goes out–even if it gets removed from a particular offending site–people can read it on Google News, technorati, their blog reader, various cached news feeds, etc. Face it–it’s out there.

Check with sites to see that they respect embargoes, before sending your news.

This goes in particular for sites which are well known for pre-releasing news whenever they want, or who have an outright policy of not respecting embargoes. We chuckle ever time we see this in Valleywag (for those not familiar with Valleywag, they exist to tweak the nose of Silicon Valley–and embarass folks for stuff like this all the time.) There’s a number of publications notorious for this–make sure you check with them first, and also see what kind of reputation they have. (For the record, you should contact us and ASK about what kind of news and if we’d even agree to an embargo, and for what reasons–we’ll let you know. Don’t send us something BEFORE you ask us.)

Don’t embargo run-of-the-mill, who-cares sort of news.

It’s one thing to embargo some huge news, where our writers are going to need to do some research to prep a well thought out article. It’s another thing to try to embargo something which no one cares about. Stuff that might merit an embargo: huge investment by a publicly held company/strategic partner; or a merger/acquisition. What does NOT merit an embargo: your  small, private company releasing a minor, version 10 update of an very old product; your promotion of someone internal to “Director of Business Development.”

Don’t send us an embargo news item at 2am Monday morning for release 7am Monday.

Don’t bother with embargoes if you’re not giving the publication you’re approaching adequate time on the news. The principal reason for embargoes — to help give a publication time to put some depth in reporting into your news — doesn’t work when you don’t provide them adequate time to research and write a piece. We see this quite regularly. (btw, in general, it’s bad to send emails to most writers/bloggers at 2am on Monday morning, because there’s bound to be a pileup of emails with Monday releases, not to mention whatever came in earlier on the weekend).

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.