Archive for the ‘Embargos’ Category
The In-person Media Tour is Dead
There. I said it. The in-person media tour is dead. In the 1990s, “desk-side” briefings reigned. We regularly tracked executives’ travel schedules and lined up press meetings in New York, San Francisco and Boston, often with five or six each day. These often took place months in advance of an announcement, back when lead times for some print publications that published on a monthly schedule were as long as six, or even eight months.
Today, the technology world often works on deadlines of a few minutes. We’ve heard stories of stressed out bloggers, working around the clock to keep pace with their ambitious competitors, and then suffering heart attacks. I understand how this could happen. Often, if we have set an embargo for 8:00 a.m. ET, we’ll see a number of bloggers post their pieces at 7:58 a.m. ET just so they can say they were first, and to inch their way up in the search results. Embargoes, of course, are an entirely other issue (for more, read: The Embargo Lives, for Now).
Sarah Lacy Launches PandoDaily: PR Takeaways
I was thrilled to see Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) launch PandoDaily (@PandoDaily) today. We, at InkHouse, have been following Sarah from the business journals of the Valley to BusinessWeek to TechCrunch (as well as her book writing along the way) and are thrilled to see her launching her own venture. Since I read the rumors last month, I’ve been eager to see the official launch. Read Lacy’s post about why she started PandoDaily for the full story, but here are the important takeaways for PR people:
- The focus is startups. Lacy’s goal is “To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle.”
- There will be three full-time writers. Two are yet-to-be-named, and the other is Trevor Gilbert.
10 PR Predictions for 2012
2011 was a good year for PR. It’s growing and changing for the better, as I wrote back in June. While it’s harder to break through the streams of tweets and updates that fly at us each day, PR has an unprecedented opportunity to tell stories through new vehicles. The stakes are higher though, so we have to be smarter and more creative. I used to tell clients not to worry too much about negative coverage because Google’s memory is short. Well, it’s gotten a lot longer this year with archive searches, so you can Google this post next December and call me prescient or just plain wrong.
Scott Kirsner on Embargoes and the PR/Media Landscape
Meg posted a piece on the embargo debate on June 14 and today, Scott Kirsner has posted his view on this evolving issue in the PR and media world. An important issue for all PR people today.
The Great Embargo Debate
Ten minutes ago a reporter from a major news outlet “accidentally” broke an embargo on a major piece of news for our client. I won’t share the name of the outlet or the client, but needless to say this is an incredible frustration — not only for me and the client, but most importantly for all the other news reporters that agreed to honor the embargo. Not surprisingly we were barraged with emails from these reporters whom we had given the release asking, “WTF”?! They get frustrated with us for “allowing” this to happen. Of course our relationship with those reporters (and the relationship of our client) is now harmed. It’s a bad situation for everyone — except for the reporter who broke the embargo who now gets the opportunity to be the first to break the major news.
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