The Unconscionable Ethics of (Some) Tech Journalists
When companies pre-brief me on products that'll be publicly unveiled at some point down the road, they provide me with an embargo date; a month, day and time before which I'm supposed to keep a muzzle on myself. The embargo date fundamentally exists so that the company's competitors aren't able to obtain an advance heads-up on what's brewing, in sufficient time to cook up an announcement of their own. Apparently, unfortunately, some of my peers don't embrace the same embargo definition. As explanation, let me share with you the latest in a decade-long line of examples.
Several weeks ago, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies' PR representatives approached me to schedule a pre-CES briefing on the Deskstar 7K1000, an upcoming $399 1 TByte 3.5" 7200 RPM HDD, in both PATA-133 and 3 Gbps SATA variants, based on PMR storage technology. Other relevant drive specifications include:
- 148 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density (editor note: a fairly conservative areal density target, which did not enable 250 GBytes of storage per platter but probably improves manufacturing yield and data reliability)
- 1070 Mbits/sec peak media data rate
- 8.7 ms average seek time (including command overhead)
- 4.17 ms average latency
- 32 MB data buffer (SATA variant)
- 26.1 mm height
- 700g max weight
- 5 (1 TByte) or 4 (750 GBye, also planned) platters, 10 or 8 recording heads (SATA variant)
- 300 G/1 ms pulse non-operating shock
- 9.0 (5 platter) or 8.1 (4 platter) watt idle power (SATA variant)
- 2.9 Bels typical idle acoustics
- 5-60 degrees C operating temperature
- Now sampling, production-available in the retail channel by the end of Q1 2007
Yesterday (Thursday) morning just past 8AM PST, I received the product information via email. At the time, I was clearly instructed that, "These materials are under embargo until 12:01 a.m. ET Friday, January 5." Yet, oddly enough (I'm being sarcastic), just a few hours after I obtained Hitachi's embargo information, I received an email from a Seagate PR contact, which began (bolded emphasis is mine):
Seagate has received a number of inquiries about its plans to deliver a 1 Terabyte (TB) hard drive, so I would like to provide you with an update…..
Seagate's 'announcement' was short, and extremely spec-deficient. Yet writeups on Seagate's 'news' immediately began to pop up on the Internet. Seagate snagged a nearly 12-hour coverage jump on Hitachi, even though I'm quite confident the company didn't have any intent to unveil its 1 TByte drive on Thursday….that is, until it caught wind of Hitachi's pending plans. Seagate is normally very good about pre-briefing me on upcoming releases and, until yesterday at noon I hadn't heard a thing about a TByte product from the company.
Don't get me wrong; I don't blame Seagate for what they did. Heck, if I was in their shoes I probably would have done the same thing. And granted, Hitachi's news wasn't terribly earth-shaking; I predicted 1 TByte 3.5" HDDs nearly nine months ago. Hitachi previously signaled its terabyte intentions just four months back and, as Gizmodo points out, Hitachi's by-end-of-Q1 forecast actually represent an up-to-3 month slip from the company's originally-unveiled aspirations.
But, by leaking Hitachi's embargo information to Seagate, my counterparts at other online and print publications were not only unfair to Hitachi, they were also unfair to me. It's increasingly difficult to convince companies of your impeccable journalistic scruples when an increasingly large number of your peers act otherwise; analogies to used car salespersons and attorneys would be apt at this point. And it's also unfair to you….how do you know who to believe when companies' behaviour degrades into dueling press releases and PowerPoint presentations, neither of which may have any basis in product reality?
So why did other journalists leak the news to Seagate? In a word: laziness. Realize that many of them don't have the technical background, via academic training and/or hands-on trade, that I do. Realize, too, that many of them don't have my luxury of being able to focus in on a few (still extensive!) specific application and product areas; their editorial 'beats' are comparatively very broad. And realize that all of us are, in this era of the Internet, under varying degrees of pressure to get our writeups in front of your eyeballs as fast as possible. Non-technical journalists have other means of assembling meaty stories; for example, by contacting a subject expert from the pre-briefed analyst list that we're often supplied by the vendor. But I guess they decide it's easier to just whisper the pending announcement to the vendors' competitors, thereby potentially securing a meaty quote but, at the same time, doing serious harm to journalists' ethical integrity image.
