In Arrington's typical over-the-top egomaniacal style, he makes this case with maximum bluster. But when you boil it down, it comes down to these points:
- Arrington is sick of being hounded by PR people who would kill for a placement on his site, one of the top tech start-up news sites on the Internet
- He's particularly sick of playing by the rules when it comes to embargoed stories, only to have others break the rules and break the news first
- So, he's not going to honor embargoes anymore, even if he accepts some information under embargo
- He'd rather have stories exclusively, but only from PR people he trusts
Reduced to these points, his complaints and strategies are hardly new. TechCrunch has some power in the marketplace, so Arrington is trying to leverage it by demanding exclusives. The Wall Street Journal does this all the time. In turn, other bloggers are trying to gain market power by first agreeing to the same embargoes that TechCrunch does (or did), then posting first in the hope of climbing up the search rankings. So Arrington's little game of accepting embargoed information and then breaking the embargo at some point afterward is an attempt to fight back against those who would challenge TechCrunch's supremacy.
So much for the analysis. What does it mean for PR?
First, I'm just so sick of hearing about lame PR pitching. Could we please start doing a better job right now? How about making it a New Year's resolution?
Second, if you're going to play with embargoes and exclusives, you've got to know what you're doing. You can't send out embargoed releases without first getting the recipients explicit permission and buy-in. You can't pitch multiple exclusives. You can't do either of the above strategies with media you don't know or trust. How many times do I have to say this?
Take Arrington's screed as a warning and a wake-up call, before our whole profession gets put on the "blocked" list.
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