Seeing as I’m doing this whole blogging thing professionally, I get a lot of stuff sent to me under embargo. Some people hate them, and I can see why –if you know something, you know it, run it. But I also see why they are useful at times — I think we might all kill each other and rush to publish crazy/unfinished stuff, plus it gives the companies some semblance of control.

Today, however, I was really turned off to the whole process by a bad experience. I won’t name names only because it’s not entirely clear who all is to blame yet, but I have a good idea, and anyone who really wants to know shouldn’t have a hard time putting two and two together.

So I’ll spell it out this way: I get a call this morning from Company A – they have a partnership to announce with Company B. Company A tells me they want to make sure I have first crack at writing it up, something which I’m very happy to do. They put me in contact with B who then also puts me in contact with their PR firm.

I agree to an embargo time of 6 am and get sent the release, yadda yadda. By now it’s the afternoon of the day prior, so I have plenty of time to write something up. I go about the rest of my day, write a bunch of other stories, do other calls, the normal routine.

At 6pm I sit down to take a break, eat, and watch the NBA Finals game. Naturally (at least for me ) I have my laptop on the couch with me and am just going through some news. Imagine my surprise when there is the Company A and B story is starting me in the face — some 12 hours before the embargo time I agreed upon.

Now people break embargoes all the time. It’s a real point of contention in this industry and from what I can gather so far, some people are dicks about it, but most of the time its either accidental, or one of the larger publications, like a major newspaper, has published something on it and that causes a chain reaction of everyone else publishing.

This doesn’t seem to be a case of a broken embargo, I believe this was just an idiot company (Company B) and their PR firm making me agree to an embargo that they knew meant nothing.

Now let me be clear. I have no problem with companies wanting to hand out scoops to certain sites or publications. But if you’re going to do that, don’t feed me bullshit that I can’t write anything until the following day – and so I plan my whole day around other things – only to see it while I sit down to take a break and watch a game I was looking forward to.

That’s a dick move.