Embargoes live on, TechCrunch notwithstanding
Late last month, TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington declared The Embargo is Dead. Earlier, Arrington had announced that TechCrunch would break embargoes with a few exceptions. That was followed, Arrington wrote, by the Wall Steet Journal implementing a no-embargo policy unless it ensured an exclusive.
Next came a couple highly visible violations of embargo agreements, including a Google embargo that PaidContent broke early. Arrington concluded, “With Google and Microsoft no longer able to hold embargoes, there really isn’t much left to do but abandon the whole practice. I, for one, am happy about that.”
Arrington is flat-out wrong. Embargoes are not dead. They’re not even on life suport. In fact, they’re alive and well…and useful when applied appropriately.
Arrington’s focus is the tech world, a sort of Lewis Carroll Wonderland where inhabitants sometimes forget that the rest of the world is still out there. The rest of the world—from healthcare to retail to automobiles to apparel—doesn’t necessarily march in lock-step to the tech world’s rules.
At a healthcare communications conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, yesterday, I heard a presentation about how The Mayo Clinic goes beyond pitching the media by being the media. In his remarks, co-presenter Karl Oestreich, who leads Mayo’s national media relations team, tangentially mentioned embargoes a couple times. After the presentation, I chatted with him for a minute and a half about the use of embargoes by The Mayo Clinic and in the healthcare industry in general. Here’s what he said:
What Oestrich suggested about healthcare is true in most other industries. I’ve no doubt that Arrington meant to restrict his observation to the tech world, but it’s still worth clarifying.
But even in the tech world, the embargo still has a toehold. To begin with, the Wall Street Journal’s policy—which isn’t new—doesn’t exactly abandon the practice of embargoes. A WSJ source noted that “We can still work on advanced stuff with a certain publication date in mind, but we can’t accept an embargo that ties our hands to a particular time, particularly one that isn’t exclusive.” Further, one of the organizations that broke embargoes—VentureBeat—asserts it does honor embargoes; its slips were caused by WordPress’ failure to accommodate daylight savings time, leading to stories appearing an hour early without the publishers knowing it.
Personally, I’ve had few reasons to in my 30-plus-year career to request an embargo. But as you know if you read this blog regularly, I usually don’t find any merit in “fill-in-the-blank is dead” observations.
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