Another nail in the coffin for embargos at Piaras Kelly PR

Another nail in the coffin for embargos

Published October 21st, 2005 in E-PR

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water -ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide - Mark Twain

I was keeping track of stories breaking during the day on my RSS reader when an interesting title popped up on my screen. Freelance technology journalist, John Collins, was at the International Wireless Conference this morning in the RDS, Dublin. He posted an article about how Comreg is auctioning off 3 National Licenses for broadband services at 11:53am.

I didn’t hear anything else about it until 16:36pm today when I received the press release (as reported on RTE at 19:38pm) from the Comreg PR department. So we’re looking at a time difference of about five hours before a release was issued and another three hours before it made it onto the RTE website.

It got me thinking that tools like blogging are sounding the death knell for things like embargos. As soon as someone hears about something this can be communicated instantly to the world.

Another funny thought is that journalists are always quite keen to get a scoop. How soon do you think it will be before people like John Collins regularly report live from events and blog their report to websites like the Irish Times or RTE?

Technorati Tags: Piaras Kelly, PR, John Collins

2 Responses to “Another nail in the coffin for embargos”

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1 John Collins Oct 21st, 2005 at 4:47 pm

What’s interesting I think is how blogging is impacting on my job as a tech journalist. I was sitting at the conference not expecting much from the ComReg presentation when David Gunning made the announcement about auctions which I knew was a significant change of policy. I rang the Irish Times to see if they wanted a news story. The editor I deal with wasn’t available so while I was waiting I said why not blog it - after all I’m sitting there with a wireless broadband connection and my laptop. Does this mean I’ve scooped myself with the blog over the version in the Irish Times this morning?

It’s all a long way from when I used to edit PC Live! and the magazine appeared every two months. The news is really becoming instant and the tools needed to partcipate are now cheap and widely available.

PS - you need to fix the link to the ComReg release - it’s also pointing to Tagging Tech.
2 Piaras Oct 22nd, 2005 at 1:33 am

Thanks for the comment on the link, it’s fixed now.