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WHAT: Embargo Policies and Strategy - Best Practices Webinar

Pitching research news under embargo remains one of the most effective ways to earn media coverage. Join us for the next session in our monthly webinar series: Embargo Policies and Strategy – Best Practices Webinar

This session will dive into key embargo policies and best practices, exploring how strategic timing and content release can influence public reception and media coverage.

WHEN: Tuesday April 15, 2 PM ET

Where: Â鶹´«Ã½ Live Zoom Room (address will be included in follow-up email)

Download the PDF webinar presentation here

Thom Canalichio, COO, Â鶹´«Ã½: What we're going to talk about first is when to use embargoes. So like I said about the early notification that you might get about research so that you can do that embargoed pitching, how to assess and make the choice between doing something as an exclusive versus an embargoed news release. Also about how you communicate internally about embargoes, what to say about embargoes to your stakeholders in terms of your organization's leadership and to the researchers that are publishing papers that are the most common piece source of material for embargoed news pitching. We'll also discuss what to do when an embargo is broken, some things that we do here at Â鶹´«Ã½ to help out in the unfortunate case that that happens, it's rare, but we do have a process in place, and it can be very effective at resolving the situation. So we'll talk about that, and we're going to also share some data about the effectiveness of embargoes, and comparing that to research news that's published or promoted without an embargo versus ones that are promoted with an embargo, and how much more effective that is, and putting that into the context of threats in our industry and challenges that people in our field are facing in terms of budget, staffing and all other kinds of issues that using embargoes is good strategy. It's a good practice, and ultimately supports job security.

So we'll go ahead now and talk about exclusives and targeted pitching. If we have pretty much everybody responding to the poll, we'll close that, and we'll look at the results later. For now, moving on to what we want to talk about. Is it an exclusive or is it an embargoed news release?

So what we want to recommend is that you can accomplish both, and if you're given enough time that you can be pitching things to reporters that you either have contact with personally or that you find through a media database, and be pitching that story to them in the process that you're putting together an embargoed news release before it or after it. And it's certainly up to you whether you want to attempt to approach things as an exclusive if you want to do that, we recommend doing that, but with a certain time limit. And if there aren't any bites to that exclusive, go ahead and proceed with embargoed news release distribution to a wider audience of reporters. And in that case, we would be kind of changing the idea of exclusive to more about early access. And reporters would be receptive to this. If you're saying, you know, this is something I'm going to put out a news release about but I want to give this to you, kind of in a personalized way ahead of time, and if you're interested in covering it, interest in interviewing, we'll give you priority, we'll give you that early access, and they will hopefully be able to work with you. In that case, we also recommend doing personalized pitches that you time with the embargo if you're not doing exclusives, more ahead of time and you've got an embargoed news release, if you look on newswise, we have tools for a media database that you can select a group of reporters. We call it our Select Media Database. You can select a group of reporters that you want to share that info with in a personalized email. So if you're putting that embargoed news release on newswise, you can choose 50 to 100 or more even reporters that you might send a personalized email to and say you can see the embargoed news release. If you agree and you want to know more, write me back, incorporating that into your process somewhere. So we go all the way from starting with an exclusive opening that up to, ‘It's getting distributed by embargo to a larger group of reporters and targeting those people with personalized messages that you can strategize and come up with an approach that will really maximize the results that you get.’ And we're going to talk more a little later about how to maximize, how to see what those results are likely to be. In the poll, it looks like most people are saying that they're only getting notified about a day to one week before the publication date. We understand that that's definitely a challenge. The more notice you get, the better, and only a few of you, I'm pleased to see, are only getting notified after it's been published. That's good news. That's certainly an issue for a lot of PIOs at other institutions that they're not getting any advance notice. One of the things that I want to talk about here, if you don't have time you see here my last bullet point, what if you don't have any time embargoed research alert, is the answer that we have here as one of the options within newswise, and I'll show you an example of that later, that it can be a way to put something out under embargo without writing the sort of formal style press release you can still follow up with that more fully written out press release, but the research alert using just some language from the abstract or the summary of the paper. We'll show you an example of that as we go on. And one other aspect of the embargo period and the strategy involved is consider whether the story is a good story to do a virtual press briefing. We've done these frequently with something under embargo, where we're inviting reporters a day or two before the publication date and having them join a zoom call together with the researcher, and they're able to ask questions, they're able to hear a little bit of a presentation from that researcher, and then they can go and they still have a day or two to finish up writing that article before the embargo lifts. So that's another question that we want you to ask yourself at that period where you've gotten notified you're coming up with, what are those materials you're putting out? What's your strategy going to be? Offering a virtual press briefing is a great way to really keep your researcher’s time efficient, and you can have multiple reporters join, hear from them all at once, so that you're not scheduling a different call, a different day, or lots of emails with questionnaires. You can tell them to come to a virtual press briefing, and you can ask all your questions at that set day and time. They may have other follow ups at that point, but you may find that this can kind of knock out a lot of that interaction and really get that time management to be extremely efficient, doing it that way. 

Going back to the server, I mean, to the survey real quick, we asked also about pitching exclusives, and it looks like the majority, 100% of you said I pitched to targeted reporters at the same time as my embargoed news release. That's fantastic news really enforces the strategic recommendations that we would make, and I really like that. So thank you all for your responses to those questions.

Next, let's talk about what to tell your stakeholders. This is probably for the PIOs that we talk to who have a hard time taking advantage of embargoed news releases. This is the area where there is the most kind of stickiness in terms of practice and policy.

It is worth reminding your stakeholders and the researchers that you engage with around your organization, your university or association, whatever that might be, that the researchers can talk to you about an embargoed journal study, the journal will not punish the researcher for talking to their communication staff about what they're doing and that you know how to handle it, and you know how to manage the timing, about managing the interaction with the journal in order to move forward with that. So with many researchers, they may kind of get a message about this from time to time, once a year, or maybe once every few years, they're not necessarily publishing that frequently, that they're thinking of this in the front of their minds, the way we are as people in communications. So we just encourage to remind people of that frequently. That could mean telling your Office of Research, your deans, your fellows, any other kinds of contact points that you have, who might be the types of experts who are publishing journal research, that they can tell you about it and that you know how to follow the right procedure, and it will help them get more coverage.

We recommend enlisting your deans of research, for example, at a university, to help you with this. These different stakeholders have an incentive to be accommodating, especially when you're able to say to them, this is going to get more results if we can do it this way. So coordinating with the journals and the timing and the disclosures, sometimes those researchers can sort of be intimidated by that very contractual sounding email that they get about your article is in the process of publication.

They get a little bit scared of talking to it. I've been told, you know, even that some researchers think they can't, you know, share any details with their family at the dinner table. Obviously, this is going a little bit overboard out of caution. The real problem is not publishing something on a public forum or in, obviously, a news outlet talking about it with personal acquaintances or with your own colleagues in communication is allowed. So give your stakeholders a reminder about all these things. And one last point I want to throw in there is to ask them to please be available at the time that their journal paper is getting published, not to go on vacation that day. We've had this piece of feedback frequently. We've managed virtual press briefings where a researcher is traveling and it's bad timing, maybe something that they didn't plan to have happen at the same time because the journal is telling them it's getting published this date, they've already booked a trip, either for personal or even professional travel to a conference or something. We've been able to work that out and coordinate that in order to schedule a virtual press briefing when you remind your researchers about this process and about giving you that early heads up. Mention that, mention that, try not to be out of the office the day before and the day of your study getting published, because reporters will potentially want to talk to you. 

Here's the big, big uncomfortable topic for today, and that is, embargoes do sometimes get broken. It's unfortunate. It can be very stressful. We've kind of coached many of our members through that process and done everything that we can to try to resolve the issue. So here are a few tidbits about that. It should not scare you off from trying to use embargoes if it's not something that you typically do, the likelihood of an embargo being broken in a story published early is very, very low. We've had, I would say, fewer than,fewer than one a year on average for the last 18 years that I've been working with Â鶹´«Ã½, and in almost all of those cases, we've been able to connect with that outlet and get the story removed in a relatively timely fashion, usually a matter of just a few hours at most, the likelihood of many readers seeing a single story posted a few hours early is very low if it's not being shared virally on social media, which it almost never does, it's not getting read by many people, but we find out about it because we're searching for and doing Â鶹´«Ã½ Alerts on mentions of the organization name or the topics in the news release. So as a communicator, if you have those things set up a Google alert for your own organization's name, then you will see it first, and we can help you to try to resolve that issue before any or many other people see it. So share that link with us right away.

Contact us. You can reach us. You know, call us directly on our phone number. Call me on my personal line. Email. Â鶹´«Ã½, we have our editor at Â鶹´«Ã½ email group that many of our staff see all at once. That's a very easy way to get in touch with whoever is looking first, and will kind of muster the troops to take the next steps. And what we will do is to try to reach that reporter personally, with all the means that we have when they register and sign up in our system with contact info and where they work, we will beat the bushes until somebody responds about taking the story down.

Most of the time, that's been that reporter directly. Other times, we've been able to reach another contact at that media outlet. And we have an extensive database where we often have other contacts at that same media outlet who might be an editor or other level of person that can quickly get someone to take something off their website. So let us into the process, and we will help to resolve it.

If it's possible to identify that specific reporter, they don't always include bylines at some publications, but when that's possible, we do warn them that any lack of response is putting their access to embargoed news at risk, and I've only witnessed one case where we didn't get a reply from the outlet within a reasonable amount of time to take down something.

Remember that it's not the end of the world. We certainly don't want this to happen. We want to take all precautions against it happening. But the consequences are not severe. Mistakes can happen. Limiting the damage is the most that can be expected. So don't be afraid to take action. Let us into the process, and we'll help to resolve it as soon as possible. If anyone has any questions or comments at any point, by the way, feel free to chat those to us.

I want to share some data on embargoes so that you can kind of have some backup about doing this process and the value of it. So one thing is a recent study here that we've, I'm just going to unshare my screen so I can copy that link. I will share this in the chat for all of you that you're welcome to take a look at. And this is a really interesting study about the effectiveness of embargoed news pitching and the effect that it had on citations and altmetrics. This is published in Springer nature, scientometrics. Okay, so that's in the chat for all of you now. They've done a very thorough job of breaking this down and kind of developing their own metric, including things like the impact factor of the journal and sort of controlling for subject matter. All that's to say, in general and in the long run, they're demonstrating that embargoes are effective. Embargoes do result in more citations and higher numbers in those alt metrics.

Looking at the details, you can kind of parse that a little bit at your own leisure, in general, here at newswise, we've done kind of a broad sample and study of things. We did an original look into this about 12 years ago. In 2013 we found that embargoed research got 47% more coverage. I've done an update on that with a smaller sample, we did more than a year's worth of data when we did that number back in 2013. But just for today's purposes, I did a small sample of 60 research releases from March of this year, and the embargoed releases got 80% more coverage. Some of that may shake out in terms of the numbers kind of regressing toward each other, because some coverage doesn't actually get published until a few weeks into the process, or a month or so more, in some cases, depending on the outlet that that might be. So some of the some of the non-embargoed stories from March that I've included in my sample might get a little bit more coverage as we go, but for the most part, the gap is increasing between embargoed stories pulling ahead and getting more coverage than even other research news that's not given that embargoed treatment, so going from 47% more 12 years ago to 80% more today. So that conclusion, that takeaway that I want everyone to have in the back of your mind when you talk to your stakeholders about this, is that embargoes are becoming more important than ever to ensure that your science news gets the coverage that it deserves.

So a little more about how we handle embargoed news on newswise to make sure that you can see how this can work for you, and I hope that means you'll be more open to doing more of it in the future.

All the reporters that sign up for newswise are individually verified. Their applications are reviewed and checked to make sure that they are a legit reporter from a notable, reputable news outlet. If there's any doubt about that, we give them a provisional status where they do not necessarily get access to embargoed news, and they're asked to provide more info if they do want to get embargoed news. So that application process is highly secure and each of those individuals are verified, and part of that user agreement is that they agree to honor embargoes when they register. We've also included, I'll say, as an example, more graphic and alert information about embargoed news. We've given all embargoed stories a really big red border with this is embargoed and the upcoming date at the embargo lifting highlighted there very, very prominently. We've increased the prominence of those messages to make sure that reporters see and note that embargo.

One of the other advantages of embargoed news is that it's included in the wires every day while it's under embargo, we've made some announcements about this in the past. We've been doing it this way for, I think, about two years. If you weren't familiar with this, just to give you the nutshell, if you gave us something today that's under embargo until Monday of next week, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday. Each day that that embargo is in effect, it will go into those wires to reporters each day. Many reporters don't necessarily look through all the stories in the wire every day, and so we wanted to make sure that as people kind of check in and check out from day to day, if something is still under embargo, that they get an opportunity to see that. And at any one time, we might have 20 to 25 stories under embargo, three or four coming off embargo each day, some new ones being added in each day that list of embargoed stories appears at the top of the wires for reporters, those stories are sorted to the top, and I'll show as just an example. This is an old copy of the wire, so you're not seeing anything currently embargoed, but this version of the Daily wire went to reporters on March 10, and you'll see here under medical news, we've got one from American Academy of Neurology, another from Neurology. Here's American College of Physicians, Washington University in St Louis, Michigan Medicine. Each of these under embargo sorted to the top of that section, and that's going to kind of churn a little bit day after day, but the reporters are always ensured that they're going to see the embargoed stories first, so that they can take note of that and give it its due attention.

Another thing that I mentioned earlier, when you're really pressed for time doing research, alert, this is a new article type that we put into effect a couple years ago, as an alternative to the sort of traditional news release format and style that is enabling you to simply take some language from the study. Here's an example from UC San Diego from the end of December. They gave this to reporters under embargo for a couple days before the publication date.

You see that it's very short, just a couple of bullet points. A lot of this language, I think, is kind of copied and maybe edited slightly from the paper, abstract and summary. They provided a quote from the expert, and, most importantly, the link to the study, so that the reporter can then see that and then read the full study. So this research alert option, if you're given that short notice, if you're given only 24 hours notice, oh, I just forgot to tell you, but the Journal said my paper's coming out tomorrow. If you can whip together 300 words like this, copying the summary, making some bullet points, maybe incorporating AI, the topic of our recent webinar about the use of AI to create rough drafts of things. You could create some brief piece of info so that you can at least get it into that wire, going to reporters, or start pitching it under embargo with something like this, research alert option.

Targeting specific lists of reporters. I mentioned that we have this media database. I'll share an example. We did this with another member. This is Binghamton University that had a study about butterflies and the decline in butterfly species. We were doing a virtual press briefing the day before, or, I think, two days before the embargo lifted, we put out an invite to a select list of 200 reporters. Approximately. We got about 50 of them to open that message, and we kind of provided them with the details of the study in this version. In other versions, we provided them with a little bit of a teaser and said, Come to this upcoming virtual press briefing. This all being done while it's under embargo, letting them know that it's under embargo, asking them to, you know, honor that, and inviting them to ask questions, follow up and come to a virtual briefing. So that's one way that you can continue that strategy of the broader reach with the embargoed news release, as well as the targeted pitching to hand picked contacts that you want to make sure get that. And then last, like I said about this, I keep clicking, and it goes to the next screen about that last study that we did a virtual press briefing. Here's an example of the press release from Binghamton about that event.

And so here's their release that they gave us under embargo ahead of that, and we got, here's for example, a clipping report we do media monitoring of stories that look for news coverage. This got almost 40 different items of news coverage that we were able to track on that report.

Last but not least, before we move on to some other parts of the program, getting these results, this increase of effectiveness, in light of a lot of things going on, with funding, with the economy, with the world.

Obviously it's a concern about the future of the communications industry. A lot of PIOs ask themselves questions about things like job security. So want to just put out there and give you this takeaway, that in these tough times, using strategies like embargoes, and getting the results that you can get with those embargoed news releases is one of the best defenses you have to justify your job and to really prove your value as a PIO and communications office to your organization's embargoes get more results that you can tie directly to your pitching activities and you  know how to do that. It's not something that AI looks like it's soon to replace in terms of that relationship and that personal touch that's required in order to do that. And organizations that know about this process and understand it well should recognize that it's needed to maintain a staff of qualified media relations professionals in order to do things like this. So that's my little pep talk for everyone to keep embargoes as a key part of your strategy. I want to invite our collaborator, Rick Borchelt, retired communications officer from the Department of Energy, Office of Science, to help us tie in some of the big picture about the use of embargoes. Rick, what would you say is important, an important point for all of our PIOs to keep in mind about the importance and effectiveness of embargoes?

Rick Borchelt:

Well, hi there everybody. I don't know what the word retired means, and in my case, since I seem to keep pretty active in chatting about these topics and with everybody, and a number of you are really good familiar names to me, and it's always great to see you again. I think it's helpful in this conversation, to keep in mind why embargoes arose in the first place. So even though you wouldn't know it now, it wasn't designed to give some papers or reporters an edge in reporting. It was designed just the opposite, to even the playing field so that folks from large organizations with lots of resources could would not dominate small institutions or freelancers who didn't have those kinds of resources, and this was in the days when they were all equally trying to reach the PIs before email, when people were trying to call call folks up, and when you were talking to each one of them by phone. So it was one way to ensure that your PI had an ample opportunity to talk to all the reporters you wanted her to, and for reporters to do some deep, nuanced research, to write the story. And embargoes really can still work that way. I think there's a reason to have embargoes still today, even though I think many folks have questioned whether embargoes for that purpose are still at all effective, that's because today, it's more likely that reporters for the large daily organizations now completely stretched for resources, completely stretched for time, completely stretched for personnel juggling multiple stories at a time. They're the ones who are going to be disadvantaged and need the time to deeply research and write a complicated story. So that's why I think it's still important to be able to have embargoes available, particularly for the large and complex kinds of stories. Now it happened pretty quickly that embargoes became a competition game, and it really wasn't, at that point anymore, making sure everybody got access to the same information. And that competition game was really not between newspapers. It was between the wire services. If AP filed the story first, the great likelihood would be that most of the newspapers in the country would we would carry an AP story, not a UPI story, and UPI was a great contender at that point, not writers, not agency France press, it would be whoever got whichever wire story got that first and got it posted first would capture most of the stories in the newspapers. And that meant that the newspapers would favor those wire services that routinely got them early access to stories, because that meant that they would get early access to the people who would be reading them, and therefore to add revenue. Now today, at least, we know that wire services don't drive news coverage the way they used to. Â鶹´«Ã½paper, electronic shares do the newspaper or the magazine or the outlet, whichever files the story online first, has a good chance of dominating the news environment around a given story. And if they dominate the news around a story and get it out there first, they capture the ad revenue that goes with it, the likes, the clicks and all that kind of stuff. And a good example is this recent direwolf de-extinction paper. It was a great example of why that doesn't work that well anymore. The way it used to, the race was on to get that story reported quickly and capture eyes and capture ad revenue. So the pressure was so great that many news outlets just cut and pasted the news release and went with it. There was even a can set of quotes that came with that, just to get it out there. And while I don't think it's very ethical, you can use embargoes this way, keep the embargo time very short, too short to do research, and basically require that anyone who wants the story out quickly has to use your release or bullet points or can statements and quotes. And while I say it's not particularly ethical, I'm just saying you can use an embargo that way. But here's where the two scenarios of exclusives and embargoes, which really are two different things, begin to converge. Federal agencies in particular, because they're political animals, reward favorable coverage of their agency or their issues by granting Early Access, sometimes with an even earlier embargo, to stories that are likely to command coverage or not with under embargo at all, just only give it to certain reporters. And DOE, when I was there was a good example, although I have to say, the Office of Science resisted as much as we could. I didn't give exclusives, but I will admit that sometimes I would make sure the reporters I felt would do a good job with the story, would get notice that it was coming out earlier. If it was embargoed, I'd give, you know, even more lead time than I normally would be required to do under the embargo to credibly cover it. So it's, I think, helpful to understand that historical perspective of why we have an embargo system and how it can still be useful, even though it probably does not have the same functions as it did in an earlier news environment. But there are ways to actually use embargoes to ensure that as many people, regardless of what kind of resourcing of time and energy and effort they have to put into this, embargoes can really be a really good relationship building activity for a PIO to deal with reporters and help them get stories, and help them get those stories deeply researched. If that's really what you want, if you want a story that's well-written, deeply researched, multiple perspectives, then an embargo is the way to go. If, on the other hand, again, I question the ethics of this sometimes, but as a practitioner, I will say, if your interest is not so much to make sure that everyone writes deeply researched, nuanced stories, but uses the information you provide them, the shorter the embargo time you provide, and the less access you provide to other sources for that story that'll be helpful to you. Those are sort of the broad outlines of embargoes as I've come to understand them over the years.

Thom Canalichio:

That's great. Thank you so much for your insights, Rick. And don't just take mine and Rick's word for it. I have, for example, a conversation, some notes from a conversation I had with an executive at Health Day, a very prominent health and science news site. They told me about the value of embargoes and mentioned the first thing you mentioned was giving them time to write the article and schedule it on the day of publication. They're more likely to use it because of that, as Rick said, it also gives them more time to more deeply investigate their own background on the subject and potentially find other voices that they might ask to quote on it. That's one of the things that they also mentioned to me that would be valuable if you can provide as a PIO if you ask your researcher. Is there another expert in this field that you would recommend that reporters could ask about this who maybe didn't participate in the study as an author, but somebody that reporters could find to ask them about the significance of it? Those kinds of things will really help for reporters to make the case to their editor to give them the go ahead to to write about that embargoed study. Another piece of feedback from Health Day was providing more context about the significance of the paper, for example, by including the impact factor of the journal. That might be one of the ways that you can really make sure that reporters know this is big, because it's coming out in an influential journal. That's very important to them. They also asked for visual aids, just kind of tried and true Media Relations practice of giving visual aids that is just as important on embargoed research news as it is on anything else. And that was something specific that they mentioned. And lastly, one word of caution not to use embargoes to try to game the system for lackluster news. Â鶹´«Ã½ wise, generally, our policy is that embargoes are for research news coming out in a journal or being presented at a meeting. There are other cases where you might legitimately put something under embargo. If there's a major announcement, a press conference or other kind of event, generally, it's frowned upon, or at least not received favorably, if people put an embargo on something kind of for no good reason, and this was something unprompted by me, that they came back as part of their feedback not to abuse the embargo convention to try to make something out of something that's not really news. So those are some takeaways from my conversation with an executive at Health Day that I hope you know that's useful for all of you.

And I want to kind of wrap things up and invite Jessica in to open the floor for some further questions, as well as launching another couple of questions in a survey. And I want to start this off first by announcing that we're working on a project on the topic of catching embargo breaks as part of our media monitoring. And for example, the clipping report that I showed you of the one about butterflies that we did a live event on, we are working on utilizing that system to alert our staff if something catches a news clip online before the embargo lifts, so that we can try to take active action on that proactively. So I'm working with that. I'm working on that with our technical team to develop that process and enable those alerts so that we can be the ones to take action on resolving that issue. So with that, I want to invite Jessica in, and we will turn on everyone's ability to unmute yourself if you have any questions or would like to make any comments about this topic or others, Jessica.

Jessica Johnson Papaspyridis:

Hi everyone. So we had mentioned, I mentioned briefly in the beginning, but you know, for everyone, we would like these kinds of events to be also a place where you can connect with your peers and other people in communications and feel free to talk or, you know, pose questions, pose the situations and share. So we're going to just stop the recording.