I’ve been a full-time blogger for nigh on five years and a journalist for almost ten. In all those years I’ve signed NDAs and followed embargoes with reckless abandon, potentially John Hancock-ing my life away just so I could look at a new camera.
Why did I do this? Because I knew that the PR process was broken but I was happy following along. Most of the embargoes I agreed to were for products I wouldn’t have written about early – or at all – even if I didn’t have the full power of the People’s Court hanging over me. NDAs and embargoes are a gentleman’s agreement between the journalist and the PR professional designed for a time when it took four days to get from Scranton to Philadelphia by horse. By creating an embargo, you gave Joe Blow at the Flushing Daily Bee the same chance to write up a story as Jimmy Reporterpants at the New York Times. NDAs were designed to keep reporters from blabbing about what they saw and giving up their secrets to the competitors.
Both concepts are broken and here’s our current policy.
Embargoes – We will keep them, based on a handshake agreement (we won’t sign them unless we like you), and we will break them if we even have an inkling that the story might go live early or if we feel like. If that’s a problem, we’re happy to wait until the product launches officially and write about it five seconds after the Internet. We will do a bad job of it, not having been privy to the information beforehand, but that’s the price we have to pay for our principles.
NDAs – We won’t sign them. If your client is so worried they’re going to lose out to a competitor then let us suggest to your client that they close shop. Unless they’re Apple, most of their employees are disgruntled and would tell their innermost secrets for a Klondike bar. Don’t place your success in the hands of an unruly mob of overweight word diddlers.
What of my other writing gigs? The New York Times does not officially want me sign embargoes or NDAs. I cleared this up with an editor a month or so ago. Again, I want you to be happy so if you tell me not to write about something within a certain time-frame I’m happy to oblige. But I’m not going to worry if something comes out late or early. There’s a war on and we’re in a financial crisis. Your cellphone isn’t that important.
The same goes for MobileCrunch – ask us about an embargo. Heck, IM us about it. We’ll agree, but God help you if the information gets leaked early. We, as a rule, won’t be doing the leaking, but if we’re in a foul mood we might. We’ve been good boys and girls for years but we’re tired and cranky and our boss has sent down an edict from on high.
Fight the power!
Truth is that by the time you guys are shown a new piece of gear 99% of the real development work has already been done. The few days or weeks until official roll out won’t help a competitor at all.
All it really does is keep the flow of information under the control of company marketing types as long as possible and has almost nothing to do with help a competitor.
Why?
Competitors have either been:
1. Already been working on almost the same thing for a year.
2. Or, have decided to go in a completely different direction and have been working on that for a year.
3. Or are going out of business.
It might seem like new product turn around times are quick, 3-6 months or so but that is only because most companies have multiple overlapping teams making incremental improvements.
I design consumer equipment, and a product that is visualized today is at least a year away. In the meantime my company will introduce other new products created by other design teams, next month, next quarter, 6 months from now etc.
If my competitors are awake at all they will be starting a design that likely is similar to the design I am starting and will bring it to market at about the same time we do.
Our marketing department will usually send pilot production pieces to print reviewers 2 or 3 months in advance of our official roll out. This give the writer time to write, and publisher time to publish hopefully resulting in a nice article shortly after our roll out.
A really successful company design team will take this to the next step. That is envisioning several increments ahead and in the process coming up with a game changing product.
thanks for the input… I agree, and it’s one thing when someone says “this is under embargo, we’ve got a flying car coming out in a year” but it’s another when they say “this is under embargo while we make sure all the competing sites have the exact same info written up as you”
Please don’t post this comment until tonight.
lol
See you broke embargo already.
Now I’ll have to sue you.
Quite honestly, this whole embargo thing the past couple of days is already boring. I had a whole dissertaion typed up, but don’t think we need to spend any more time on this than necessary, so here’s synopsis of keywords:
MA ego trip, hype-machine, artificially inflate, unimportant issue, professionalism, common decency, two wrongs, blah blah blah, childish, self-absorbed, power, really?
Ugh, I just bored myself typing that…
To someone, somewhere it’s important. But i agree it’s stupid, generally.