Tech Journalists Getting Fed Up With NDAs and Embargos

I read Molly Wood's Inside tech journalism: the NDA game with great interest for two reasons. Link: Top Gun, I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you. What about Google? They're not exactly standing on the street corners, waving signs that signal their next product. (But you can assume they'll whip out that 20% time thing.) MSN? Same thing. It's clear that the way PR, Marketing, NDAs, and Embargos work is changing. I routinely get solicitations from PR firms asking me to look at a pre-announcement or listen to a pre-briefing. Some do this because I'm on their media list via my Linux Magazine affiliation. But an increasing number of this specifically mention my blog. As Molly says: We media types need to quit kowtowing to manufacturers who are trying in vain to hold on to the last shred of control they think they have. Those manufacturers need to wake up and smell the RSS feeds--the information's already out there. Quit acting like you're doling out spoonfuls of sugar to the deserving few. Your audience is getting its sugar elsewhere. I've noticed that in industries where the competition isn't quite as insane as ours, the players are far more concerned about getting coverage than worrying about who they told first. Sometimes you can almost read their desperation between the lines. What some journalists have figured out is that we almost always post something on the Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog