5 PR tips for when the reporter’s deadline is minutes away

There. I said it.

In the 1990s, “desk-side” briefings reigned. We regularly tracked executives’ travel schedules and lined up press meetings in New York, San Francisco, and Boston, often with five or six each day. These often took place months in advance of an announcement, back when lead times for some print publications that published on a monthly schedule were as long as six, or even eight months.

Today, the technology world often works on deadlines of a few minutes. We’ve heard stories of stressed out bloggers, working around the clock to keep pace with their ambitious competitors, and then suffering heart attacks. I understand how this could happen. Often, if we have set an embargo for 8:00 a.m. ET, we’ll see a number of bloggers post their pieces at 7:58 a.m. ET, just so they can say they were first, and to inch their way up in the search results. Embargoes, of course, are an entirely other issue (for more, read: The Embargo Lives, for Now).