There’s a concept in the journalism world called an “embargo,” and it usually means agreeing to get some piece of guarded information ahead of other people, with the understanding that you won’t reprint that information until a specified later date. The reasons behind these embargoes range from the sensible to the spurious, and the outcomes are often hurt feelings.
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One semester in college, I showed up for classes a week before they started. Still not sure how I managed that.
I also can’t read an analog clock face easily. Both of my parents tried, but it never clicked. I still wear a watch, but I really have to study it to read it, which puts me in a bad spot when someone asks for the time.
I have, on multiple occasions, forgotten I’ve booked holiday at work, or forgotten a public holiday, and turned up at the office. Now my boss takes the piss out of me for it, and makes a point of reminding me when I’ve got a day-off coming up.
I feel like Jake should get COTD.
Hey Matt, seems like you wanted the CR person’s name to be REDACTED, but then you use a name twice later on in the article. Or are these 2 people and I’m a dummy?
Well that clears things up, I felt like I was taking crazy pills. I normally catch TMD pretty much the moment it goes live, so I saw the CR news on the day that starts with T.
Ahhhhhhh, that’s what happened. Alrighty then.
I noticed it was the CR stuff that was taken down, but couldn’t think of why, not connecting embargos with anything other than “new car model news”. But yeah, this makes sense.
Mistakes like that and the subsequent damage control always makes me feel ill as hell (been there… a lot). Glad you were able to pull it before things really spiraled.
It was usually the time zones that got us. Our CMS was set to utilize GMT if I remember correctly (and we were not located anywhere NEAR that part of the world), so we’d have to remember to convert whatever time zone we were given into GMT for automatic publication when the time came. And of course one of us would screw up once every couple of years (not a terrible record, considering how many embargoes we were subjected to).
I think we finally had two screw-ups in quick-ish succession and the devs mercifully changed the CMS so we could set publish times for articles using whatever time zone we were given, and very nicely, it would also display it in our local time zone to help us with organizing the other content around the embargoed stuff.
Many years ago, my ex-boss accidentally broke an embargo by showing a yet-to-be-unveiled BMW (the leak made it to Autocar and all that). BMW was somewhat annoyed, but in the end things were resolved relatively quickly.
Just don’t start chasing Jalopnik for articles. It always bothered me when I would read an article at the old site, they would link to their source (I appreciate this part) but then I would go to whatever website it was and basically read the same thing. While I understand, it is hard to give a “voice” to press release news, there is a reason we are all here… and not there anymore.