There’s been a lot of chatter on my feed about Facebook Oversight Board’s decision to release its ruling to some journalists and academics on embargo.

I thought it would be worth talking about how newsrooms can and should think about embargoes. /1

First, to address the obvious question: yes, embargoes are a PR manipulation tactic.

When you accept embargoed material, you usually cannot do what journalists normally do, which is consult experts about it. /2

Sometimes that trade-off makes sense – particularly if it is a story in which you have enough expertise to provide the proper context.

But often the trade-off means that you are missing outside voices that could have shaped the coverage. /3

However, newsrooms accept embargoes all the time because it lets them move fast. The moment an announcement is released, their story is ready to run.

And being fast makes money. The first story out often gets the most clicks - and clicks mean ad views, which means $$. /4

Embargoed news is a form of what I call “pre-release” journalism — stories that aim to be first but would have come out in a press release eventually.

IMHO, that is not journalism’s highest calling. We should fight to get stories that wouldn’t otherwise be published. /5

Courts do not usually release their rulings under embargo (legal journos please correct me if I’m wrong).

But companies often release news under embargo as a way to control the narrative.

That @OversightBoard chose the embargo route is a sign of how they see themselves. /6

However, it is unkind to blast journos who accept embargoed material. They work in a structure that values speed and novelty and they are delivering.

I have accepted many embargoes in my life, when I was being judged on how many “scoops” I could get. /7

It took me a long time to realize that scoops were often being used to manipulate me and the coverage I was producing.

Journalists are vastly outnumbered and outspent by companies with sophisticated PR teams that play the embargo game (& many other games). /8

One rule of warfare is if you are at a disadvantage on one battlefield you should seek to change to one where you have an advantage.

That’s one reason we don’t chase scoops & embargoes @themarkup - because pre-release news is not the battlefield we want to play on. /9

We pursue stories that we think would not get written if we didn't write them. We collect data that we think would not get collected if we did not collect it.

We think that is journalism's highest calling. /end