According to The New York Times, under a new rule, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia on the Russian News Service, the country’s largest independent radio news network, must be “positive.” By somebody’s definition.

So, if you or your client have a Russian product, well, the radio network is frantically searching for anything positive to talk about. They need to counterbalance death, bad weather, nasty politics, violence, poverty, rising prices, falling output, — or, presumably, news about what they can no longer report.

This particular brand of censorship looks like a ready-made opportunity for their broadcasters to say nice things about a product — praise and positive reporting that we could only hope for in the rest of the world.

A colleague and experienced PR practitioner, Ned Barnett, just sent me some thoughts about Embargoes. With his permission, I re-post his note here:

In a recent ProfNet listing (a valuable and fairly inexpensive tool used by American PR folks to learn of reporters/editors interests in talking to specific experts), a PR reporter asked if press release Embargoes were dead. I think they are, and thought this might be an interesting discussion here. So - based on what I wrote him, but adapted to the Commons - here are my views on Embargoes …

Embargoes were dead long before bloggers arrived - they were dying even as the 24/7 cable news cycle was just being born, a decade ago. They were dying when “news” in Silicon Valley was measured in nano-second time-frames. The post-9/11 Internet, along with “social media” and places like YouTube, bulletin boards of angry investors, bloggers, podcasters and private individuals with multi-thousand-name email push lists (among others) have made embargoes both dead and immaterial. Added to this is the fact that increasing numbers of editors and reporters have blogs or email push-zines of their own, and routinely “scoop” their own publications - generally with management’s blessing.

Beyond that, the media is constantly getting great tips, leaks, leads, back-door documents, etc., from disgruntled employees and others with pre-release access to information. If you don’t put it out yourself, NOW (while you can still control it), trust that if it’s really newsworthy - hence “worthy” of an embargo - it will be leaked and used.

For all these reasons, and probably many others, the embargo is dead - and has been for most of a decade. This seems especially in the last 3-5 years, following the rise of blogs, YouTube, and other “social media” hungry for scoops and not overly concerned with journalistic conventions of the last century.

Ned Barnett, APR
Marketing/PR Fellow, AHA

RBB: I don’t know about “dead,” for I don’t operate in a market space that routinely uses embargoes, but what Ned’s saying makes a lot of sense to me.

Still, I’m sufficiently wide-eyed to believe that, if you know and trust the journalist, an embargo may be okay. Gives the journalist the time to thoughtfully prepare a work product, maintains and enhances that individual relationship, and may very well give a better outcome for your company or client.

But, clearly, the practitioner has to be careful in using embargoes, for everything Ned says about the speed-of-electron pace of what passes for news these days is on the money.

Thanks, Ned, for sharing this idea.

Okay, those of you who aren’t into science fiction won’t “get it.” Too bad; you need to get out more.

Shel Holtz, ABC, has posted an interesting description of SHIFT Communications’ new Social Media Press Release template in “The shape of press releases to come.”

SHIFT presents what it calls a “radically different format [that] is more à la carte menu than standard press release. In a non-linear fashion,” they continue, “it ties together narrative, quotes and various multimedia (RSS, social bookmarking, photos, etc.) on one page. Journalists & bloggers can ‘re-mix’ the elements into the story THEY want to write.”

Is this the next big thing?

Well, maybe. SHIFT’s approach certainly contains some good ideas, presenting media release information in a variety of state-of-the-art multimedia formats that any techno-twit would love.

Are we “there” yet?

No.

A few journalists and a handful of savvy early adopters will experiment with the format and refine it and twist it and tweak it and play with it. We’ll see what is basically a good idea tortured into unrecognizable forms and stretched and crushed and reworked and mushed-about into incomprehensibility. Scholarly papers will be written about it, along with many words in many blogs.

And then, after tumultuous, tiresome tweaking, the industry will adapt, and some of SHIFT’s good ideas will bubble up through all this turmoil, and, after a time, they will contribute to changing the way more and more practitioners construct releases.

Personally, I’m more intrigued with the formatting of the SHIFT template than with its social interaction/multimedia content features. Those will develop through time. Over the next few years, we’ll have so much new technology that we’ll look back on their Template, Version 1.0 as a cute, quaint first step.

But the format ideas hold some real possibilities.

That said, there’s only one test: Whether journalists like it.

If we’re smart, we’re all about providing information in the way that best meets the needs of the user. As I’ve said elsewhere in the IABC Media Relations Commons, It’s about them, not about you.

Or me.

Or even about the slippery slopes of SHIFTing Shapes.