TechCrunch: No more embargoes

As you can tell, I'm catching up on news of the past couple of weeks. Many of you probably saw this, but if not, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington declared Death to the Embargo.

But don't miss his bigger point: PR agencies are not serving their clients well. He makes an argument that's hard to combat.

PR firms are out of control. Today we are taking a radical step towards fighting the chaos. From this point on we will break every embargo we agree to.

Background:

Tech companies are desperate for press and hammering their PR firms for coverage on blogs and major media sites. That in turn means that PR firms hammer us to get us to write about their clients. Gone are the days of polite pitches and actual relationship building. Today, PR firms email a story to us as many as 20 times, and call every TechCrunch writer on their cell phones repeatedly.

This is so important a post for PR professionals, that I'm including more of his direct comments:

A lot of this news is good stuff that our readers want to know about. And we have the benefit of taking some time during the pre-briefing to think about the story, do research, and write it properly. When embargoes go right, we get to write a thoughtful story which benefits the company and our readers.

But there’s a problem. All this stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn’t used to be this way, but it’s becoming more and more of a problem. As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.

This is really serious, and I believe Arrington's comments are spot on.

In defense of the embargo, it is not something exclusive. There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking to pre-brief under embargo to any number of reporters. Personally, I think a proper strategy is to limit the number of pre-briefs to a few (three, four or so).

In my view, what contributes to this "spam" that Arrington speaks of is the demand for coverage volume. When the expectation by the client is on clip count or coverage in a certain book ("get me into the Journal"), you end up with a smile-and-dial media strategy. If you're approached by a PR agency that promise some form of coverage volume or coverage in a certain media outlet, run.

Instead, hire a firm that will focus on developing an effective competitive positioning strategy, and execute media relations program that supports that strategy ... the right media coverage in the right outlets reaching the right audience at the right time.

Finally, his comment about the broken embargo -- whether intentional by PR agencies or not -- is really unfortunate.

One annoying thing for us is when an embargo is broken. That means that a news site goes early with the news despite the fact that they’ve promised not to. The benefits are clear - sites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.

There has always been a love-hate relationship between journalists and PR "flacks." To be balanced here, there are good PR firms and bad PR firms (I am on record of valuing good PR firms as strategic business partners), just as there are good doctors and bad doctors, good lawyers and bad lawyers, and so on. But when I read accounts like Arrington's I'm struck with the realization that PR agencies (I'm speaking in general) need to work on their own reputations.