How news embargoes work, and what happens when a reporter breaks one

A news embargo gives a journalist information before it is public, on the condition that it is not published until an agreed date. The arrangement is about a century old and is used by journals, governments, institutions and companies.

Science is the stronghold of embargoes, with some use in business and politics.

What an embargo is meant to do

Sonja Gruber, an editor in the business department of the Austrian Press Agency, studied the practice as a Reuters Institute journalist fellow in the 2014 Michaelmas term. She defines an embargo as an agreement under which a source gives journalists information that must not be published until a set date. Her paper concludes that the embargo "has not yet outlived its purpose", though speed, digital media and economic pressure strain it.

She describes the logic as mutual. Journalists get time to prepare accurate stories, and the source is more likely to get accurate coverage. The tool was invented about a century ago, mainly for practical reasons, and was originally timed to newspaper print deadlines.

Those deadlines are gone, but sources and journalists defend the practice with largely the same arguments as in past decades.

Gruber does not expect the embargo to become extinct in the near future. She thinks it may go in very different directions by sector, and she expects mobile devices and fragmented news consumption to disrupt it further.

Where embargoes are still used

Science is the stronghold. Gruber notes that embargoes have been central to the media policy of major science journals since the 1920s and remain so.

In finance and business, the picture is more mixed. Online publishing, especially on Twitter, and computerised trading have put heavy pressure on financial embargoes. Gruber reports that listed companies no longer withhold market-sensitive information this way but still use embargoes for softer topics.

Her paper separates several types: those imposed by institutions that release market-sensitive data, those used by private companies, and a distinct news agency embargo. In politics, she found government agencies more likely to tighten security against early leaks than to drop embargo systems altogether.

She also reports that PR professionals find it harder to sell stories in advance, because journalists are increasingly expected to publish immediately. Sources still want to maximise the impact of their messages, so they have to think harder about timing.

How Nature runs its embargo

Nature's own documentation shows the mechanics. The Nature Portfolio journals send a joint press release every Monday, alerting journalists to articles scheduled for advance online publication the following Monday.

Journalists register on the publisher's press site. Subscribers to the monthly press release are switched to the weekly releases automatically and do not need to register again. According to the publisher's support page, the embargo lifts at 14:00 Eastern Daylight Time on the day before publication.

Nature's Maxine Clarke explained the rationale in a blog post dated 29 August 2007. She wrote that the system serves scientists, authors, journalists and the public, and gives the media fair and equal access to papers. Journalists receive the complete final version of a paper, so they can comment in an informed way.

She argued that peer review gives journalists confidence in published work, and that early release to the media undermines that confidence and prevents journalists from getting independent expert reactions.

Clarke also described the support around the system. Nature runs its own press office to help authors with the media and to help journalists find papers. Journalists get author contact details, and where a News and Views article accompanies a paper, its author is available for comment before journalists' deadlines.

What enforcement looks like

Ivan Oransky, then executive editor of Reuters Health, wrote in a post published on 20 October 2010 that reporters who publish before an embargo lifts can lose access to future materials from the journals and societies that issue them. Journals and societies often distribute studies through services such as EurekAlert.

Gruber describes a similar dynamic. Journalists mainly keep embargoes because of time pressure, and only for hard news. Sources threaten sanctions against those who break them, but she found these are rarely carried out.

A related rule operates on the journal side. The Ingelfinger Rule, named for Dr. Franz Ingelfinger, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1967 to 1977, lets a journal reject papers whose findings the media reported first. Oransky notes that many other journals have adopted it.

Where embargoes draw criticism

Critics come from both journalism and science. David Whitehouse, a former BBC science correspondent, wrote in The Independent about his growing feeling that the embargo system is a thing of the past. Clarke's post summarises his case: it encourages bland, indistinguishable science coverage across newspapers, forces Sunday papers to run weak stories, works as a marketing tool for journals and is disliked by scientists.

Vincent Kiernan, author of Embargoed Science, argues that embargoes make journalists lazy. In Oransky's account, reporters chase each week's big studies and avoid original reporting because editors expect coverage of whatever everyone else covered.

Oransky's post lists inconsistencies between publishers. The New England Journal of Medicine used very short embargoes. Some journals embargoed material that was already published, and others kept embargoes in place after outlets had reported the studies. Others lifted embargoes at each reporter's local time, which gave a New York outlet a head start on one in Los Angeles.

He wrote that the American Journal of Kidney Diseases did both at once: it embargoed material already published and set an embargo that lifts at a reporter's local time. He named JAMA, the AMA's Archives journals and the Nature journals as two of the most consistent. He suggested that the real purpose of embargoes is to control the flow of information.

His rule of thumb for reporters is blunt: "You can't embargo something that is already in the public domain." He points to USA Today's Steve Sternberg, who in September 2010 turned the tables after doing a bit of digging, as a response to a restrictive embargo.

Oransky also advised reporters to negotiate with the embargoing institution, which sometimes changes the policy. He reported that at least two societies dropped policies he had criticised. The Association of Health Care Journalists was collecting examples of restrictive policies at medical conferences.

What this means for a company announcing news

The documented record points to a few practical facts. In theory, both sides benefit from an embargo agreement. Oransky describes the penalty for breaking one as losing access to future materials.

A publisher that controls the release schedule can set a fixed cycle, as Nature does with a weekly release and a stated lift time. Gruber's research finds journalists keep embargoes mainly for hard news and under time pressure.

Her research also points to timing. With stories harder to sell in advance, sources have to think more carefully about when to release. Oransky's rule of thumb is that information already in the public domain cannot be embargoed.

Related coverage: How much of revenue do companies spend on marketing, and how reliable are the benchmarks?; How the FTC's 2023 endorsement guides define disclosure for paid coverage.