HP breaks its own news

Taylor Buley of Forbes.com notes that Hewlett-Packard broke the news Tuesday that it was suing its former CEO Mark Hurd by posting a story and the lawsuit on its own site.

Buley writes, “Usually this would mark the moment when I urgently ask Forbes researcher Sue Radlauer to help me dig up the legal docs so I can publish them on behalf of you readers — except this time I was beat to the punch. Some fast-fingered reporter? Nope. I was beat by HP itself.

“HP published a blog item with a screaming ‘BREAKING’ headline. It published the complaint to Scribd and linked to it for all to see. The company later dropped a copy in a public Dropbox account for direct download. Its official Twitter account tipped Techmeme, a high profile technology news aggregator, which subsequently pushed out the press release directly from its homepage.

“Hurd’s move to Oracle is hot news. Aside from analysis and editorial filtering, people also want raw information. Had HP not published this legal document itself, I would have gladly done it for them. Instead, HP’s blog post suggests that the company has figured out how this online news thing works, and that the computer giant’s PR department might be as blog-savvy as me and the rest of the Internet.”

Read more here.