Frankie Flack: Screw biz journalists, I love embargoes

If there’s one things business reporters seem to hate about my kind, it’s the embargo: an agreement to receive information, but sit on it until a specific time. TechCrunch has waged a gleeful war on the practice, and even the august Wall Street Journal  doesn’t like to play the embargo game. So if both ends of the business-press spectrum hate the embargo, there must be an open-and-shut case against us sneaky flacks, right?

Hardly.

Flacks love embargoes for two reasons, and both of those reasons serve the public good just as much as our clients.

The first reason we love embargoes is that it gives journalists the time to get things right. The reality is that, given the constraints, most reporters do one hell of a job reporting in real time. Let’s say the accuracy rate is 99 percent. Or even 99.9 percent. Here’s the thing: my bosses don’t want to take the 1 in 1000 chance that their news will get screwed up. They’d rather send things out under embargo and eliminate that tiny silver of potential error.

We’re not the only ones. I’ve written before about how the government uses embargoes, and that’s something to behold. Reporters and editors are ushered into a windowless room. The door is locked. All communications are cut. They get the figures for economic growth of jobless claims or whatever and have 30 minutes to review them, under embargo. Then, at the appointed house, the  phone lines are open, stories are filed and — voila! — the world has its economic numbers.

Do you remember the GDP ever being inaccurately reported? Me neither. Compare that to, say, the mess made of the coverage of the Obamacare Supreme Court decision. Sure, that was an exception, but — again — my clients don’t want to be an exception.

The other reason we love embargoes is that it forces the press to consider news independently, without seeing which way their peers are going. If I let a dozen journalists know that I’m launching a new product on Monday at noon, they can’t look around see if other media are writing about it. They have to assess the newsworthiness in a vacuum. That’s a good thing for me. Otherwise, everyone will take their cues for Reuters or AP (or, God forbid, PopSugar) and you’ll get the wonder of pack journalism.

Having to assess each and every piece of news that comes across the transom  makes the job of journalists that much harder. And I sympathize: the volume of email and the torrent of pitches is just ridiculous. Of course, embargoes are a (partial) solution to that problem, too. A story that you can chew on and gather context about without a looming deadline or a competitor’s piece to match can be a nice luxury.

The official reason that TechCrunch and others reject embargoes is that they’re essentially gentleman’s agreements, and the benefits of breaking an embargo and publishing information whenever an outlet damn well pleases can sometimes outweigh the risks of any punishment (screwing over all of the embargo-biding outlets in the process). But broken embargoes argue against embargoes. It argues against dumb embargoes. There’s no way in hell I’m going to tell a corporate secret to a reporter that I can’t trust, and anyone who doesn’t exercise that kind of diligence gets what they deserve.

But that doesn’t mean that the concept is flawed. When it’s well-executed between a flack and a reporter who have history, an embargo is a classic win-win. In fact, I have a great story in the hopper right now. And I can’t wait to give it some of my buddies. Under embargo, of course.