The insanity of embargoing press releases

Journalists may sometimes depend on having a good relationship with influential PR people and therefor more willing to accept an embargo on a news story, but 1) you can never count on it and 2) bloggers don’t. So if you are distributing a press release with embargo your whole launch plan might be out the window if the recipient doesn’t feel like playing along with your rules. I never understood the purpose of an embargo anyway.

Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey spills the beans on today’s launch of MSNBC.com’s RSS feeds. The story is a bit embarrasing for the PR agency who sent the email. The agency just changed name to DBC Public Relations Experts and then managed to spell the headline wrong: “EMABRGOED: MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops”. Maybe Sam didn’t understand what emabrgoed meant.

Via Micropersuasion.