Just saw this in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed, timestamped 9:48 pm EDT:
AP - Advisory: The NASA Colbert story is embargoed until 11:10 p.m. EDT and will be resent at that time.
Oops. Because this appeared in my Yahoo Entertainment AP RSS feed at 8:11 pm EDT:
NEW YORK – One small step for NASA, one giant running leap for Stephen Colbert.
NASA announced Tuesday that it won't name a room in the international space station after the comedian. Instead, it has named a treadmill after him.
Um, hello, AP? In the modern world, you can't take back a broken embargo quite that easily. Once you've released a story onto the Internets, it's out there for everybody to see. You know, like a mistaken e-mail. (And if you weren't so busy feuding with The Google, maybe they could help you with that type of error.)
In the old days, AP would make embargo slips like this occasionally, but since its wires appeared only in newsrooms, it was easy to take it back: You just sent out an advisory to newspaper members asking them not to use the story. You know, kind of like the advisory shown above. Alas, that doesn't really work, anymore. Got that?
And sheesh, the AP embargoed a story about naming a treadmill after a comedian?? No wonder they tried to withdraw it!
what?!? you can still embargo a story? and hope to keep in under wraps? someone must have a time machine...
Posted by: feller | April 20, 2009 at 04:49 PM
Embargoes still exist. Often so that sales & marketing strategies can be co-ordinated.
Remember "News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress" (and therefore couldn't be embargoed by definition), "everything else is advertising" - Lord Northcliffe.
A colleague of mine, David Atkinson, has just blogged about falling foul of his publisher's embargo ( http://bit.ly/gY6F0 ) for which he is now in hot water!
Posted by: Alastair McKenzie | April 27, 2009 at 03:46 AM