
  The Last Has Fallen. The Embargo Is Dead.  - transburgh
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/23/the-last-has-fallen-the-embargo-is-dead/
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drusenko
This is bad for startups (although we don't have any evidence yet that
TechCrunch is intending to break all startup embargoes).

Part of a successful launch is getting the news out to several outlets -- you
hit one particular reader on TechCrunch, a different one VentureBeat, etc. And
by hitting multiple news sources, a single reader is much more likely to
remember your story when presented with it multiple times.

Also, startups tend to have very specific launch cycles -- you are most likely
scrambling to get everything out the door, and might not have a working
product launched before 4-5am the night before. Sending users to an non-
functional site not only gives them a bad impression of your service, but
massively detracts from the benefit of the news coverage in the first place.

Without an embargo, it's more or less impossible to coordinate coverage from
multiple sources -- once a story has "broken", other sources don't want to
cover it.

There's the problem of journalists breaking embargoes, and we've had that
happen to us in the past with lame excuses like "I thought it was EST instead
of PST" when it was clear otherwise -- we don't talk to those journalists
anymore. If people were a bit more stringent enforcing that, it wouldn't be as
much of a problem.

An industry-wide no embargo policy doesn't seem to be in the reader's
interests (as others have pointed out) -- an embargo leaves time for the
journalist to get properly acquainted with the product, ask questions, and
formulate their own opinion. It also enables multiple news sources to post
about the topic, from different points of view.

It's certainly not in the startup's best interest. But it is in TechCrunch's
best interest: by not following any embargoes, they are forcing companies to
aggregate their news around the highest-value source, which, having the
highest tech blog readership, would be TechCrunch.

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camccann
I agree that this seems to mostly be serving TechCrunch's own interests.

However, is it really plausible for it to work any other way, in the end?
Building plans around the voluntary cooperation of a bunch of people who would
gain at least short-term benefit by defecting, combined with the "not getting
the genie back in the bottle" nature of public information, is going to be an
unstable equilibrium at best.

All it takes are one or two influental people who are willing to take the
social reputation hit from not playing along to bring the whole thing down. If
not TechCrunch, someone else eventually. Lamentable, yet likely inevitable.

~~~
Retric
If TechCruch is always going to _defect_ then leaving them out of the loop is
probably a good idea. They are worth less publicity than the non defectors
combined so telling them is a bad idea. I think TechCruch has been slowly
failing for a while, and this is going to hurt them more than you might think.

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ajg1977
It saddens me that "new media" appears to be singularly focused on who gets to
break a story first and not who provides the most insight or value with their
reporting.

~~~
jkincaid
Old media places a high value on being 'first' as well.

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ubernostrum
Countdown to companies starting to deliberately give TC false/misleading
releases in 3... 2... 1...

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trezor
_Late last year I announced a new policy at TechCrunch – we don’t do
embargoes. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, and designed to
stir up chaos in the PR ranks._

Good to see techcrunch being classy as ever and openly admitting that they
don't really care about factual reporting.

~~~
drusenko
Actually, I've found TechCrunch's stories to be incredibly more factual than
most in the traditional media -- the illusion of 100% factual reporting isn't
the same, though, as they don't bullshit you about their process.

~~~
drusenko
Whoever is downvoting this has likely never participated in the news making
process. Traditional journalism is often wildly inaccurate, and most of it is
spoon fed from PR agencies, anyway.

