Yet another alleged death on the internet. Alas, poor embargo, we knew you well. Latest w/ the dirk to the chest is Mike Arrington at TC. I’ve written about this topic ad nauseum (which translates into man the spell checker does not like this word), and it’s worth repeating again – there is a place for embargoes, they are used too often, and they aren’t dead. Three times they make sense:
1. Complicated news. If the news announcement is either super technical or very complicated, embargoes make sense because it allows for more in-depth briefings, q/a, etc. Other option is a press conference, which does not really optimize for good questions.
2. Limited spokesperson availability. It often happens that we will only have one or two people available for interviews. In this case, it makes sense to do an embargo because it lengthens the amount of time to do briefings and levels the playing field a bit — you don’t always want to just optimize for the wire services, for example.
3. Demos. If you want to actually *show* the product, it sometimes means getting on a plane and visiting people, often on both coasts. In this case, you don’t want to leave one city, have a story appear and deal with unhappy reporters in the second city who feel they’ve been penalized by geographic distance.
All of us caught in the embargo chaos, as MIke puts it, will survive. As will the tool.