The Embargo Breaks: The Regurgitation of a Press Release

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira,

on May 14, 2008,

I missed an embargo lifting this morning.

It's happened on occasion when life has overtaken my planned schedule for testing and writing, or we've missed an email due to the enormous amount of spam that often comes into the address for pitches, but I would much rather miss being "one of the first" to review a new product or service than put out an article that shows little to no effort.

What is disappointing to me is the number of blogs I once revered who have no problem regurgitating press releases. It's obvious to those of us who've gotten the same press releases and press kits in our inboxes when you see the same quote pulled by a PR rep appear in an article.

The real question here is why those blogs bother covering a launch or release at all. There is a pressure there for the big blogs to cover everything, obviously, and I actually had a great conversation with Steve Spalding about it one evening about the current state of the tech blogosphere.

Our regular readers will notice that we have never posted 12 posts a day. The idea behind the blog is that any product we review is one we spend time with and really try to evaluate, comparing with any possible competitors in that space, and getting beyond the talking points sent out in the press release or the Powerpoint presentation.

I've been known to get a little cranky with PR people when I've been told that everything I need to know can be found in a press release, because nothing could be further from the truth. The press release is what a company WANTS a blogger to say. It doesn't drill down into any of the details that I think people DO want to know, and I can't think of a single time I've sat through a demo presentation and haven't had questions at the end.

It could be that in the quest for a larger reader base and mainstream acceptance, many blogs are willing to sacrifice the deeper coverage in order to cover all their bases. And there are a LOT of people out there who would probably rather skim bland articles quickly to catch up on all the news and move on rather than really think about it, or have their thoughts provoked. But I find myself doing a "mark all as read" far more often on the surface-level regurgitations on Embargo Lift Day than I do on smaller blogs with 1000-word pieces that really sit down and figure out what works and what doesn't for themselves.

Just last week, Sarah Perez referenced a study that suggested most people are just skimming the glut of information coming at them. To my way of thinking, that skimming is occurring because so much of the information is duplicated. How many times should I really want to read a paraphrased press release?

The StatBot just posted a Techmeme leaderboard for discussion links. If I do happen to actually peruse Techmeme, those are the links I head to for the most part, and I've learned which sources who regularly appear in those links I want to read. The reason is that I find that a lot of times, the headline article is the basic piece, and the discussion, which links to the headline as the source for the "news" actually analyzes it. Yuvi points out that Louis Gray calls many of those links "copy" links, but isn't the reverse actually true? The news is a copy of something that's heard. The discussion is often analysis. Which would you rather skim, and which would you rather sit down and read?

For Part Deux, visit SheGeeks today for my guest post.

What Should Techmeme Use for Sources? (Poll)

Profy Blogging Platform Is Generating Some Buzz

Embargo Breakers: Who Exactly Do You Write For?

The Ethics Tipping Point?

6 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Grendel - May 14, 2008 at 08:09 am PDT

I usually skim over posts which don’t have comments on a lot of the noisy blogs. If nobody else found it interesting enough to comment on, why should I bother? Then, I don’t feel a compulsive need to know every bit of pointless “news” being generated by the retarded monkeys running Web 2.0, either.
Nathan Burke - May 14, 2008 at 08:51 am PDT

I think this is a great post, and I’ve felt the same before. As a small time blogger in the web startup space, I’ve seen press releases posted almost verbatim at other blogs and have been disappointed. But at the same time, I can kind of understand it (though I’m not saying it isn’t a bad thing):

The bigger blogs are in a race against time to fire off as many stories as possible under tight deadlines. They’re in a competition with each other to get the exclusive, post it, promote it, rinse, repeat. It seems to me that in that circumstance, there is no way a prominent blog could actually take the time to do their own investigation and analysis given the cut-throat pace.

For a while I had delusions that I could join their ranks by trying to track down every breaking story and posting links to press releases, but that just didn’t sound like fun to me. When I get an embargoed story, I’m much more interested in jumping right in, trying out the service, taking screenshots and documenting the inner workings of what’s being pitched. That’s the fun part for me.

But again, I’m not trying to post 10 exclusives in a day, so I have a lot more time to devote to a single post than the big dogs. What’s my takeaway? Well, there will be plenty of blogs out there covering the regurgitation of a press release as breaking news, and that’s okay with me. If I haven’t seen the press release, there’s some value in that to me. But when it comes to digging deeper, I’ll either do it myself or go somewhere else.

One more point and I’m done:
This reminds me a bit of the difference between a quick, 30 news segment on the radio vs. listening to NPR. Sure, you’ll get a snippet of what’s going on from the headlines, but if you’re really trying to understand the story at a deeper level, you go to a different source.
Josh Dilworth - May 14, 2008 at 10:30 am PDT

C — gotta tell you, I am having a hell of a time at work this week — you know me, and hopefully I am on your list of non-sucky PR people. But there seem to be a lot of sucky PR people who are annoying the crap out of bloggers, bloggers and journalists who are mad at sucky PR people, bloggers who are mad at bloggers, people who hate press releases, people who regurgitate press releases. . . and so on. Hehehe what’s the line from William Goldman about the film business? “Nobody knows anything?” (And I don’t mean that about you — I respect you greatly and agree with this post wholeheartedly.) But it’s hard to go to sleep at night not feeling yucky, and/or wake up not feeling angry. I think Scoble got it right — he just got off the highway. Heck, Duncan left TC after a year.

I met a cool guy last night, an Austin entrepreneur named John Eric Metcalf. A while back he asked a question of his LinkedIn friends about the value of and need for money as related to 1.) happiness and 2.) entrepreneurial viability. The answer he got back from his friend Dusty is analogous in my mind to the issue at hand (http://tinyurl.com/6b8oal):

“Personally, I consider capitalism like a video game. There are a set of rules you must play the game by, there are weaknesses in the system you can exploit, and you generally have to practice to beat the difficult parts. . .You should always follow your dreams. That will make you happy. It won’t necessarily make you money though. And you usually need money to follow your dreams. This conundrum is the game we’re all playing. But, as long as you have enough money to feed yourself, your family, and your business, you can keep playing the game. If you run out of cash you’ll be forced to find a new racket.”

What I mean to say, is — some people play the game better than others, and some people have different objectives within the game. To be happy and successful you have to play the game — but you don’t have to play it like everyone else — in fact, its better not to;)

I think that you’re a great example of someone who is playing the game quite differently. Hats off! And if you need reassurance (or if I need it, hehe) — look at the RWW peeps (and many others, don’t mean to be exclusive) — amazing analysis/insight and meaty posts, genuinely nice people, meteoric rise. It works! The same way, as with the movie business, even though no one knows anything per Goldman, the good films always get seen eventually (well, with the possible exception of Killer of Sheep, but that’s another story entirely, hehe).
Elliott Ng - May 14, 2008 at 12:25 pm PDT

Oh…was it our embargo or someone elses that triggered this post? Well its a great post and potentially more interesting than our launch story!

I left a huge comment on SheGeeks part deux but thought i’d pop over here too.

Its hard to be a smaller blogger because you need *better* quality *and* you get less rewarded for it (harder to get onto TechMeme, for example).

I think marketing people in general are too focused on pitching the huge bloggers like Robert Scoble. Don’t get me wrong, I think Scoble is great, but it is the mid-size bloggers (like you, Corvida, Louis Gray) who take the time to really engage with a company and help the company raise their game. And these are the right “noise filters” for the big Retweeters like Scoble.

We marketing people (I’ll wear that hat for this comment) also need reach and awareness, so we *have* to go after coverage like TechCrunch, etc. But I personally want to encourage marketing people to support the mid-size bloggers in this way:
1. offering to do IM or email interviews…fast and efficient
2. offering to provide some exclusive angle on the story…maybe a unique visual, or a unique comment that fits with where the overall blog is going.
3. Don’t know what else, open to ideas.

As a blogger (CNReviews.com), I *totally* understand the frustration because I have spent blood, sweat and tears on the 1000 word posts and gotten little more than the cathartic feeling of pushing the post out!

Anyway, great post both parts and look forward to learning from the dialogue here.
Josh Dilworth - May 15, 2008 at 01:28 pm PDT

Elliott — I remember you from this blog post — http://tinyurl.com/2pbsab — great to meet you, and would love to know who the Twine beta is going for you. . .and am excited to try out UpTake myself;) Hope all is well!
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 20, 2008 at 05:22 am PDT

@Grendel Some of those comments may very well be taking place in other locations, like FriendFeed or Shyfter, so the lack of comments doesn’t always indicate that no one found it interesting, only that the conversation has moved.

@Nathan Obviously, I agree, since that’s what we try to do here at Profy. My theory is that anyone can read a press release, but not everyone can take the time to drill down into a new product to figure out whether it’s worth trying or not. Of course, there is obviously an audience for the quick tech news, but it doesn’t interest me at all, and those are the blogs I always skim and rarely comment on. Judging by the number of troll-like comments they get, I’m not encouraged by the readers there either, who don’t seem to be as interested in the news they are discussing as in being noticed.

@Josh I have no beef at all with any PR people. I wish I had the time and bandwidth to reply to each and every pitch because I know how frustrating it is to not get coverage for a client. It’s really tough with a blog like Profy because we get all these pitches and we just don’t cover everything, and it isn’t like we have a set rule for which ones we pick up and which ones we don’t; it all depends on what we find interesting, what we think our readers would find interesting, and what else is going on in tech at the time. And thank you for the compliments!

@Elliott Yes, it was your release, and I need to get you guys on my schedule to talk to soon. Unfortunately, offline life threw me a few curveballs last week and I was short on time. If the entire world could just keep MY schedule and have availability for interviews at 5:30 AM or midnight, I’d be able to manage this whole thing a lot better.

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