"Break my embargo and you'll never have a PR lunch in this town again!"
One of the great journalist stock intros to an article is to quote the dictionary definition of the subject at hand. So, feeling in a slightly stock intro mood, let me refer you to what the gigantic Collins English Dictionary on my desk says about the term embargo. (I think there’s something wonderfully reassuring about having a large dictionary on one’s desk, don’t you?)
Ah hem…Embargo: a government order prohibiting the departure or arrival of merchant ships in its ports, or a legal stoppage of commerce.
However, in sunny Medialand an embargo is a deadline placed on a news story by the PR before which the journalist should not publish it. Usually what happens is a press release is issued on let’s say Monday with an embargo placed on it stating that the resulting story should not be published until after midnight on Wednesday. This is pretty standard practice and, although the agreement to respect the embargo is strictly voluntary on the journalist’s part, it’s pretty well adhered to.
Embargoes are particularly useful for companies who want to brief journalists well in advance of the launch of a new product, or who have so many journalists to deal with they need a few days in advance of an announcement to make all their calls. That said, it’s also used by businesses as a way of managing the media, ensuring its members all announce a story on the date that the company has judged to be the most advantageous from its perspective.
Embargoes are broken from time to time – particiularly when journalists feel that the embargo has no purpose other than to manage them or they suspect a rival media outlet is about to break it so they decide to jump first. This is annoying from the PR’s perspective, but there’s nothing much that can be done about it other than a few choice expletives shouted down the phone and the threat not to play PR ball in future.
But now a row in the technology sector threatens to drive a coach and horses through this cozy PR-media arrangement. Late last year a respected tech news website called TechCrunch announced that it would no longer respect embargoes unless the story was given on an exclusive basis. Cue much gnashing of tech PRs’ teeth. But even as the threats of boycott faded, TechCrunch’s readership and number of page views doubled, so the site claims. TechCrunch hails its decision as a success and points to a similar decision by the mighty Wall Street Journal to follow suite this year.
So is the embargo on the way to scrap yard? Not necessarily. Certainly, it’s no surprise that this debate began in the technology sector where online news breaks incredibly quickly and the connected generation is permanently online to read or see it. In the slower, downstream news sectors like financial services, the waters are less turbulent and Blackberrys tend to be turned off as the malty bedtime beverage arrives.
Even TechCrunch admits it will still respect embargoes on exclusive stories and on stories issued by the most powerful companies like Google. The same will always be true in any sector: exclusivity is one of the PR’s greatest bargaining chips, and the fear of being cast into the outer darkness by a big player like a major investment bank or an Aviva still keeps journalists awake at night. It’s hard to explain to your editor that the biggest company is your sector is refusing to talk to you!
The journalists are right that embargoes are something PRs use to manage them and their output: an embargo always exisits for the client’s benefit, not the journalist’s. TechCrunch was right to point this out, but wrong if its thinks exposing the embargo to the full glare of daylight will make it shrivel and die like a vampire in the sun.
Embargoes are merely one manifestation of the horse trading that goes on between PRs and journalists – and as in any market the world over, the balance of power between these two parties shifts. (Yes, you can have a hard market for news and a soft market. The summer holiday is, in my book, a hard market because there’s not enough news to meet demand from the media.) There are good reasons for the practice of issuing embargoes and those have not changed. What does need to borne in mind is that embargoes canot be used purely as a mechanism to exert control over the timing of the publication of a story: that’s an abuse of the protocol, albeit a very tempting one for PRs.
Embargos will continue to be used, although their number and frequency will fluctuate. TechCrunch will continue to ignore them having drawn a very public line in the sand, as you’ll see if you click here – well, at least until the present editor departs; as for everyone else, they will continue to either respect or disregard embargoes as the power struggle between PRs and hacks continues ad inifintum.
Here’s an interesting first: CBS, the American TV network, has embedded a small video screen in the latest edition of popular US magazine Entertainment Weekly to plug its autumn schedule. Click here to see the BBC’s report or watch the video below to get the readers-eye view of this new development. Kind of neat, huh?
Will Google's Fast Flip change your news reading habits?
The experience of reading news online is something that tends to split the generations. For those people who’ve grown up alongside the net and and the home computing phenomenon, reading the headlines on news sites is a perfectly natural thing to do. It’s quick, it’s got the added advantages of multi-media, and you can skip right around the globe in a matter of seconds, checking out Kanye West making a plonker of himself at the MTV awards and then coming back to our own Gordon Brown. (See what I did there?) There are even mutterings now of US journalism students who’ve taken their entire course without once picking up a hard copy paper.
For the older among us, the web’s news coverage can be found lacking compared with flipping through a copy of the Daily Telegraph. A newspaper allows you to turn pages at your own speed, read what you wish, discard those stories that don’t attract your attention – and do all of this while slumped over the breakfast table consuming poached eggs and coffee and listening to Planet Rock…or perhaps that’s just me. A paper presents you with the news – albeit an editor’s choice of it; a website can only present you with a limited amount of current affairs, the rest you must seek out by clicking links and searching through navigation bars.
Don’t get me wrong, though: I enjoy online news and find the immediacy and range of coverage a big step forward. If there’s a significant event in the world, the web is the first place I go to find out about it. And today, newspapers can take an awfully long time to get around to covering a story – particularly an international one – that was on the web the previous evening.
But now word reaches us that web giant and all-round do-gooder Google is trying to address the problem. Today, it’s launched a new way of reading the news online called Fast Flip – a different type of interface designed to mimic more of the experience of flicking through piles and magazines and newspapers Fast Flip also promises more revenue for newspaper publishers by running advertising against their content, something the hard-pressed publishers have been crying out for.
If you’d like to take a look at Google Fast Flip, take a look here. Personally, having gotten used to the new experience of online news consumption, I’m not sure I want to take a retrograde step. And if you want to read the news over your bacon and eggs, try buying a cheap netbook and using that.
I’m half way through packing for the trip back to Blighty after what feels like a long and exhausting three days here at the Monte Carlo Reinsurance Rendez-Vous. But before I go – and to distract me from the pain of packing – here are 10 things the FWD team think you should know about the experience:
Cost of a taxi from Nice Airport to central Monte Carlo €90-€100.
Cost of the bus from Nice Airtport to central Monte Carlo €18.
Cost of a bottle of champagne at the Hermitage starts at €90…and keeps on rising.
Best party venue this year: the SCOR lounge.
Late at night, they take the jewellery out of the shop windows.
The Sass Bar. Just don’t.
Average daytime temperature during the Rendez-Vous: 28 degrees centigrade.
Worst thing to be seen wearng: coordinated brightly-coloured corporate polo shirts.
Greatest disappointment: no Aon party.
Most ubiquitous members of the media: Anthony Gould from Incisive and Jon Guy from Global Broker and Underwriter.
(Ok, I know I said 10 facts, but I just thought of one more.) Most elusive member of the media: Peter Hastie of Insurance Insider. Whenever you arrive at a party, you hear that Peter left it five minutes earlier.
So au revoir and bon chance from this year’s Rendez-Vous! Allez, salute maintenant!
Stand in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris in the square by the casino at 11am on the Monday morning of the reinsurance rendez-vous and watch it unfold before you. Tens of smart businessmen and women enter from the mica-bright Monagasque sunshine, stand blinking for a moment as they remove their sunglasses, then begin the courtship ritual. Slowly they circle the ornate lobby, glancing sidelong at the name badges of the people they pass, hunting for that elusive 11am appointment.
From the stairwells and lobbies and bars they come, and the size of the dance swells. Blackberrys are checked for details; schedules are consulted, the office is phoned. By now there are over 100 people waltzing across the tiled marble floor, and then…consumation!
“Bob, how the hell are ya? Yeah, great to see you, too. How long you been here? Get up to much last night? That Guy Carpenter, party, huh?”
And then, the slip away into the cool shadows of the cafe, the executive steering Bob purposefully towards a carefully chosen table and a tough negotiation.
By 10 past 11, the lobby empties. The dancers have all found their partners and only a few curious tourists remain. Meahwhile every table in the cafe and in any other quiet corner throbbs with talk of reinsurance premiums and cedants and capacity.
But hang on a sec’, the lobby is not quite empty: Katherine Blackler, senior reporter on Reinsurance magazine, has been stood up! It’s her first interviewee no-show of a day that began at 8am. We kill time chatting, eyeing everybody who comes in through the revolving door, and eventually 10 minutes later the sheepish interviewees claiming confusion and mix-ups and who knows what else. Apologies accepted, Katherine and her interviewees slips away into a secluded alcove and the lobby is quiet.
But only until the next round of the dance begins at 11.30am sharp.
Uh oh! Katherine Blackler of Reinsurance has been stood up!
I write sitting in the departure lounge of Bristol Airport. It’s approaching 1pm on Sunday and I’m waiting for Easyjet flight 6115 to wing its way south to Nice, where it will disgorge me into 28 degree sunshine and an expensive taxi ride along the coast to Monte Carlo for the next three days.
When one informs friends and family that one is heading for Monte but it isn’t really a conference, eyebrows rise quizzically, cynical smiles form on lips. “Oh yeah,” they nod, “sounds like really HARD work.” And in some ways, it’s hard to disagree.
A late blast of early autumn Mediterranean sunshine is a welcome treat as the British summer crumples into a wet soggy mess with a nice swine flu peak lurking just around the corner. But truth be told, the Monte Carlo annual reinsurance Rendez-Vous is hard work: three days of meetings, parties, socialising with the great and the good of the industry while the cogs of the reinsurance pricing cycle begin to rumble, lubricated by espressos, cocktails and a welcome cool beer or two.
So wish me luck for the Reinsurance Rendez-Vous and I’ll keep you posted on developments.
