Do you use embargoes? In my career, I’ve only had to use them sparingly. I don’t like to do that because it puts the entire project on a different playing field. And, yes, I do often worry that the other side won’t honor the agreement.
Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch has announced that not only will they not honor embargo requests, they will promise to honor it then go ahead and ignore it (according to shel’s post). This is very disturbing.
More important is shel’s observation that
I feel Michael Arrington’s pain. Honoring embargoes has enabled competitors to ignore the embargo and break news first. But Arrington’s response reflects a disturbing trend: People who don’t like the behavior of PR people and respond by deliberately doing something worse. Chris Anderson did it when he published the email addresses of PR people who had spammed him. Now Arrington has done it by asserting that he will promise to honor an embargo when he has no intention of keeping the promise. In other words, he has publicly stated that you cannot trust his word.
Scary stuff.
