Archive for May 2010
Did this product announcement really need to be embargoed?
So far on Embargo Watch, I’ve mostly focused on scientific information — journals or conferences, for example. (There have been exceptions.) But those are just a small percentage of all the embargoes in the world, as readers probably know.
If you cover technology or products of any kind, you’re probably subject to a constant deluge of press releases like this, which landed in my inbox early Monday morning: Read the rest of this entry »
Can you tweet from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meetings?
In genomics circles, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s (CSHL) annual Biology of Genomes meeting is a biggie. It consistently brings together the top players in genomics, and is always oversubscribed.
This year’s meeting, which was no exception, ran from May 11-15. A few days into the meeting, Discover‘s Kat McGowan emailed me. She had been following the many tweets from the meeting eagerly — hashtag #bg2010 — since she couldn’t attend. But she wondered whether all of those tweets violated CSHL’s media policy, which “requires all media attendees to obtain permission in advance from the relevant scientist prior to reporting any spoken or printed information gleaned from the meetings.”
That sounded like a good question to me, so I contacted CSHL’s media office, who put me in touch with executive director of courses and meetings David Stewart. David runs at least 50 such courses and meetings every year. Read the rest of this entry »
A ripe old mess on autism and milk- and wheat-free diet study embargo
Nearly three months into the life of Embargo Watch, I shouldn’t be surprised by now that what seem like simple embargo incidents are anything but, once I start to peel back the layers of the onion.
Still, when Katie Hobson sent me a message on Twitter yesterday around 3 p.m. Eastern about coverage of a study whose embargo she thought wasn’t lifting until 4, I figured it was a simple embargo break. After all, the study involved autism, and I remembered what happened last October when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the journal Pediatrics embargoed data on the rate of the disorder.
Then, as recounted on the Association of Health Care Journalists’ Covering Health blog: Read the rest of this entry »
No, we didn’t break embargoes on those JAMA studies — but did others?
For those of you who cover JAMA, or wait for its usual embargo time of 4 p.m. Eastern Tuesdays to devour media coverage of it, you may have been surprised by all the stories about studies in it that went live already today.
We covered three, for example: One on behavioral treatment for Tourette’s syndrome, one reporting that men get postpartum depression too, and one on a higher risk of depression among those with traumatic brain injuries.
They all went live at or near 10 a.m. Eastern, prompting one press officer to email us to ask whether we’d broken an embargo. Read the rest of this entry »