The Death Of The Embargo: We Won’t Care

Brian Solis dedicates far too much text to the topic of news embargoes, while coming to a status quo ante result on their future:

[via www.briansolis.com]

The reality is that embargoes are an important and fundamental part of the news ecosystem. They mustn’t lose their stature. As such, it is the responsibility of PR to use them only when warranted and not relegate them merely as part of a day-to-day tactic in the process of PR pitching.

Leaving aside who wrote what recently about embargoes (Brian does a good job of that), I think it’s important to look at the basic issue of trying to ‘time’ the news, which is one way to look at embargoes.

A company desires to get what they think will be the biggest bang from the release of some news, like the acquisition of a competitor or the release of a new product. The old school idea of an embargo is that if a collection of media outlets all push the news at once, then nearly everyone in the company’s marketplace will hear the news. It’s a carpet bombing approach, with the goal of having news shrapnel reaching the largest number of people.

The question is, does this approach matter any more?

First of all, we have moved to a smorgasbord style of media: people pick and choose want is newsworthy, and are much less likely to all open their newspapers over breakfast, at the same time. So, even if you can line up all the media to print at the same time, people don’t read at the same time.

Second of all, and more important, given the world we live in today, what leads to the biggest stories? As Dylan Tweney said during the panel session that seemed to motivate Brian’s post, “The stories that get the most pageviews are almost never embargoed stories.”

How do the biggest stories break? Well, they do so a little at a time, and then explode after some tipping point has been passed. One commenter talks about a product  — say a new iPhone app release — which leads to a pile-on with others agreeing, disagreeing, adding on more ideas. A cascade of interest that spills out into a growing sphere of interested parties. When communication media like Twitter are involved, this cascading is even more clear than more established social media, like blogging.

So it seems to me that companies choose to embargo in this age because they are hoping for a moderate level of awareness of what they are pushing. They have little aspirations for a big story: that doesn’t require an embargo. What they want is carpet bombing.

But this doesn’t line up with the needs of either writers, who have no motivation to be involved in carpet bombing, where their role is to stay in line and do what every other writer does, or of readers, who are interested in unique stories, or stories where opposing views yield a cumulative insight that’s greater than additive repetitions of fact.

Basically, companies that want to use embargoes want everyone else to play highly limited roles while they manipulate the medium to push their message. They want writers to act as a channel, not voices. And they want the average interested party to act like a news consumer, not an active participant in the discourse about products and their utility.

This is why we should drop our support of embargoes, more than any other: they limit us to antiquated and limited roles that don’t match our current and future interests. And they don’t even serve the needs of the companies that employ them: they are just conventional, a meat-and-potatoes sort of PR in a time of infinite options and choices.