Legal Commentary

By Michael Arrington

Late last year I announced a new policy at TechCrunch ? we don?t do embargoes. Well, it was a little more complicated than that, and designed to stir up chaos in the PR ranks. We said we?d break every embargo, and we also said we?d honor embargoes for exclusives plus a few select companies, particularly Microsoft and Google, because they had proven to be reliable. Overall, we meant to be confusing, and we were.

Embargoed news, if you aren?t familiar with the term: a company wants to announce news, like a product launch or a new funding. They brief lots of press with a stated day and time for the news to break. Press agrees not to write before that time. But generally someone goes early, with a really good excuse like a time stamp software problem, and then everyone floods out with the news. Whoever broke the story in the first place generally gets more eyeballs and attention than the others, so there are lots of incentives for mistakes. Particularly because no one ever punishes the offenders.

A lot of people said our new policy would be the death of TechCrunch. We?ve more than doubled our readership and page views since then, so with the benefit of hindsight I disagree. But what?s interesting is that since that post the embargo culture in the tech news world has essentially crumbled. Chaos rules, and even the once great Microsoft and Google have fallen.