Embargo My Ass...
Well, I've barely had chance to blog since my return from UbiDays as I've been really busy writing stuff about the event for BXB as well as making full use of the press pack!
We have a thread on BXB which is acting as a content link dump which you can view by clicking here. I also seriously recommend checking out our Naruto Preview here! We'll have more content coming from UbiDays soon and I'll be blogging in more detail tomorrow and Monday so stick around!
Ok, so these press events are always interesting learning curves for myself and this time I learnt something new. Eurogamer are tossers. It's pretty simple really. Myself and the selection of smaller fansites that were kindly invited to the event (thanks to the hard work for Ubi's Chris Easton) were told that everything we saw was embargoed until 5pm on Wednesday 23rd of May.
We all groaned a little but accepted it because everyone at the event was under the same embargo. Of course, it didn't stick. Look here, Eurogamer's sister site Gamesindustry.biz posted the Beowolf announcement literally minutes after it was revealed. Breaking the embargo.
None of us realised until Luke from Play TM came down from his hotel room on the second day of the event and told us Eurogamer had broken the embargo. Nexus.net's Nick Haywood was on the phone to his news reporter in the UK and told him to publish, I wasn't far behind.
Of course, we were over 12 hours late and on the internet, that might as well be a millenium. Apparently, Ubisoft were quite miffed at Eurogamer for doing so but thanks to the 1.2 million people that visit the site, they wouldn't dare do anything and risk losing Eurogamers coverage.
Me. If I'd have broken the embargo. I'd have probably never been supported again and for a site the size of BXB, that's very very bad news.
Perhaps in an ideal world, people will stick to rules and give us newbies a fighting chance. Then again, you could argue that Eurogamer breaking the embargo is what being a journalist is all about.
5 comments:
Hi there. Tom Bramwell from Eurogamer here. Now, I am a tosser, but leaving that aside, we were informed of no embargo in advance of the event, and when we spoke to Jan Sanghera - one of Ubisoft's UK PRs - on the evening of the announcement, we we told it was perfectly okay to post about Beowulf. If there's a mistake, I'm afraid it's not ours. We certainly respect embargoes when we're informed of them. Cheers.
Hi Tom, well, thanks for clearing that up. I'll certainly be dropping an e-mail to Chris to see what the crack is as I feel this was a really unfair aspect on what was otherwise a good show!
Hello, Ellie here - editor of GamesIndustry.biz. What Tom said. I actually called Jan straight after the conference specifically to ask if I could run a story about Beowulf, and she said yes. She also said I was correct in believing that nothing in the conference was embargoed. So not guilty! Except of being a tosser. Cheers!
Blimey. Here's me thinking no-one reads my blog...
Only to point and laugh buddy.
Post a Comment