Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsrfded | Hacker News Reader

btw, when the WSJ broke our embargo, I was on my way into the office. We were planning to get there around 3-4pm for the 9pm PT launch. Some folks were already there and turned the site live since the first press had gone up.

But techcrunch has a policy of not posting their story if an embargo is broken, so we didn't get the TC story that we had briefed them on.

View on HN

TechCrunch goes one step further. Often Arrington will get the PR firm handling the press release to allow them to publish their story a solid 10 minutes before anyone else. If the embargo is set for 9pm PST, TechCrunch often shoots for 8:50 and most of the time they are allowed. As a result, they break the story and get a ton of inbound traffic.

Not sure why anyone would shamelessly downvote me. I wasn't lying. This sort of thing happens every night.

Just look at Brightcove 5's launch that happened a few hours ago (9pm PST). TC posted their story at 8:50pm, everyone else followed at 9pm PST.

PR makes me yearn for the simple, honest world of SEO.

So what's the news on how/why the WSJ broke the embargo? What was their excuse?

(I'm posting a comment I initially was privately drafting for ryan in an email.)

I posted the article - and included the embargo paras, which my co-founder and I nearly cut - because I thought the backstory would be useful/interesting to the folks there, who seemed to be unaware of the pr process during the prerelease of blekko. I wanted to open that up for them.

Your comment was spot-on good advice for the ycomb co's though. I voted it up.

Really irked that wsj broke our embargo. Irritated that I wasn't in the office when our site went live after 3.33 years, irritated that we didn't get to do the last bug-fix push to production, irritated that I knew TC wouldn't post, irritated that other journos would be irritated with me, irritated that it flatted the temporal curve on the launch pop. And for what?

Time-sync on stories is actually a good thing for the news stream. I don't see why journos don't get that.

FYI, The Wall Street Journal stopped honoring embargoes last year. Your PR firm knew this.

Jason, to be fair so did TechCrunch but you still honor embargoes often. Glass houses, ya know.

This is true, though to my knowledge if we agree to an embargo (as in, you ask, I actually say "Yes" as opposed to you just blasting a press release to my inbox) then we don't generally break them. At least that's my policy.

Not saying you lie about honoring them (I can personally say you never have lied to me about it), just that a public "we don't honor embargoes" stance isn't always a valid indictment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com