WSJ embargo policy changes

Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org writes Wednesday about changes to The Wall Street Journal‘s embargo policy where the paper will no longer participate in group media embargoes.

Ali writes, “After speaking to various PR people who pitch stories to WSJ, it seems there are some exceptions to the new no-embargoes policy if the story is big enough, but in general, WSJ reporters will no longer be part of a herd of journalist briefings, which results in a spate of stories from various outlets all at the same time. If PR professionals approach them on a story, then they can refuse and go around and hunt down the story if they want to.

“Some of the PR people tried going around this new policy by going to other journalists/’friends’ in the publication, but after the editors got wind of this, the new rule is that only beat reporters will be writing beat stories, and no one else.

“Because of this new policy, some awkward situations have come up recently in its tech/media coverage (the parts we monitor closely and where we sometimes compete with the Journal): the Yahoo homepage relaunch story, where its reporter Jessica Vascellaro ‘brokescooped’ the embargo and did a half-baked story based on sources, when sister publication ATD’s Kara Swisher, also under an embargo went live with her story at the same time, based on an interview with the exec involved (while the rest of us were holding to an embargo time for the next morning, but scrambled to do our own stories when WSJ went with it).

“Another situation cropped up today, when Sony’s new E-Reader story was supposed to be under embargo until late tonight (and other pubs were briefed on it), but WSJ jumped on it earlier this afternoon because of its new policy.”

Read more here.