The blogosphere is currently reeling to the new stance on embargoes to be adopted by TechCrunch.
In an emotive blog post by Micahel Arrington entitled ‘Death to the Embargo‘, he has outlined his feelings towards PR firms who bully members of the TechCrunch team into writing about the companies they represent, and other website owners desperate for traffic who break embargoes with said PR firms and publish press releases before the agreed date or time.
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.
Times for everyone are hard at the moment. The credit crunch is everywhere and everyone is desperate for traffic and advertising revenue. Releasing a story a few minutes or hours early might not seem like a big deal, but when it comes to loss in traffic, it obviously can be.
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.
As a result of this, TechCrunch has decided to break almost every embargo they are asked to honour, for very obvious reasons, Google and Microsoft will remain as two, of very few, exceptions.
Michael has said he will be publishing a blacklist of every firm, publication, writer and company who breaks any embargo, and, due to the new policy, he is expecting TechCrunch to be at the very top of that list!
Related posts:
- Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress
- Google Founder Now Blogging
- Is there a correct format for a blog post title?
- Submit site to Google or Add URL to Google – no need!
- Google Launches New Blog Search Website
- Google launches venture capital fund – Google Ventures
- My Backpack Got Jets
- Google Chrome open source browser released today
- Could you be missing out on an inbound link?
- Google Chrome Comic Book for Sale on Ebay
