Embargo nonsense: Sulking Sky should ask 'why?'

Hold the front page! Workington in the North-West of England has got a new temporary bridge making life a little easier for victims of the floods in that part of the UK. The news was announced this morning to coincide with a ribbon-cutting ceremony aboard the bridge this morning but the BBC apparently broke the embargo and announced early a crucial detail of this story - the bridge is named after local PC Bill Barker who lost his life in the floods.

As a result, one sulking Sky News correspondent was up at the crack of dawn to moan about the embargo being broken, via Twitter.

It was almost as if something interesting had happened. But of course it hadn't.

Embargos are a rather silly distraction from common sense and a hangover from a time when the media worked in entirely different ways.

PR tool

There is no logical reason why this news should have been issued under embargo - which is ultimately a PR tool the media would actually do well to undermine (spoken as a former journo turned PR).

In fact, if Sky News is serious in a pursuit of quality it would be better off raising questions about why people still use a totaly inexplicable embargo such as this rather than chastising the BBC for not being willing to believe the sky may fall on our heads if it is broken.

Furthermore, if Rupert Murdoch wants us to believe his media outlets run news worth paying for then his staff probably shouldn't advertise the fact they so opently allow PR people to dictate when they run news, or the fact they're happy to publish at the same time as a lot of their free competition.

Comments

[W G Graceless]

I disagree.

The embargo is great for giving out a story early and selling-it round the media in advance of when you intend the story to run.

If the embargo didn't exist (or was broken with impunity) the issue would be which media outlet could publish the story first -potentially resulting in rushed and incomplete news reports in the scramble - and PR's would have to prioritise which hacks they spoke to first in order to not be seen to be doing over another journo.

They are sometimes completely pointless - the name of a bridge for instance - but in the age of newspapers being published on the internet I think the embargo is a very useful and still essential tool