Michael Arrington posted an interesting post today on TechCrunch, saying that the publication will no longer honor embargoes. Embargoes — which are used by PR agencies to provide an early look at news releases to editors and writers — are typically used so that news outlets have a chance to research their stories further, review web sites, and also used by PR teams to make sure there’s even coverage across a variety of sites for their news. Arrington’s hidden message to PR firms? Stop briefing all those competitors!

I’d instead agree with the folks over at Read/Write Web, where they have a more pragmatic stance on the issue. Marshall Kilpatrick writes quite succinctly when he says:

Embargoes lead to more total coverage than exclusives. If you’re someone for whom the only thing that mattered in high school was to win the approval of the most popular kid in school and you want to extend that philosophy into your work life as an adult – then the richness and breadth of your work and life experience will suffer accordingly. Exclusives are the tactic of people with weak products and of reporters who compete better in bullying than in writing.

Here at socalTECH, we honor embargoes, because we find it useful to be able to fully learn about products, companies, and web sites and not have to run the “first to post” rat race. And, we’d tell startups that talking to many publications (not just our own) is the right thing to do. The demographics of our readers are different than other publications, and vice versa. Sure, we love exclusives, and breaking stories. But, embargoes have their place.

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Uncategorized by Benjamin Kuo