Xconomy’s Wade Roush Eschews Embargoes – Long Live Storytelling

This morning Wade Roush of Xconomy posted a piece on embargoes. He’s not going to agree to them anymore, which is different than not honoring them. Wade told me that, “I will stop agreeing to them. If I ever did agree, I would certainly honor the agreement.”

This is a debate between PR and journalists that has been going on since TechCrunch famously announced that it would no longer honor embargoes. We’ve written about the topic here at InkHouse a number of times – we’ve written about how embargoes can damage relationships and we spoke with Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe about his perspective on embargoes and exclusives.

As Wade points out, the embargo is designed to provide all reporters with equal time to cover a story, and to enable them to do their research in advance of the news becoming public. This handshake arrangement between the media and PR works, but only if everyone honors their word. And as Wade has written, this does not happen all of the time. We see frequent tweets about TechCrunch breaking embargoes, and internally we bemoan the fact that someone clearly did not understand how TechCrunch and other technology blogs operate when it comes to embargoes. It’s critical to understand who honors them, who does not, and the difference between an embargo and an exclusive.

Keeping track of the list of reporters who don't honor embargoes is a new challenge for PR people. It’s an ever-changing list, and frequently gets updated when someone breaks their word, and it’s created an environment where exclusives are more popular because they eliminate the problem altogether. In some cases, exclusives make a lot of sense, but in others, they reduce the amount of awareness for our clients because it eliminates a larger pool of media who might have covered the news.

Clearly a new approach is needed. I do not have the solution, and we will probably carry on keeping close track of which reporters honor embargoes and which ones don’t until we can collectively come up with a better solution.

Regardless of that outcome, I applaud Wade for drawing attention to a much more important issue – the need for thoughtful storytelling. The 24-hour news cycle, 140-character tweets and the race to post within seconds of news breaking have created an environment where brevity and speed frequently outweigh length and analysis.  I have long admired Xconomy’s dedication to providing thoughtful analysis of the news, and can understand why Wade is opting out of the chaos.

This debate is a healthy one and I welcome your thoughts about a solution that will meet the needs of the media and the needs of startup companies trying to break through with their messages.