Survey Says: PR People Love Our No-Embargo Policy

The PR industry never ceases to amaze me. Despite the fact that we stopped honoring most embargoes back in December, 2008 and sent out a very public memo about it, we still get flooded with unsolicited emails and press releases requesting that we publish the information contained in them only after a certain date. When we decided to stop playing the whole embargo game, we fully expected a backlash from the PR industry. And, to be honest, we do sometimes have to hustle a little more to get a story or get bypassed entirely for massive launches that everyone else is covering anyway. But according to a survey of 246 tech PR pros conducted by PRSourceCode, TechCrunch is still the No 1 tech blog they target when trying to get coverage for their clients. Great.

This is a dubious honor to say the least. But I can only conclude from this survey that PR people love our no-embargo policy. So we’ll just have to keep enforcing it (with a few exceptions). In fact, and I do feel bad about this, I am enforcing it right now. I wasn’t supposed to tell you about this top-secret survey until May 20. A very nice PR person, who shall remain nameless, asked me to keep it “mum.” But I can’t do that because our policy is to share interesting news with our readers as soon as possible. Which tech blogs are targeted the most by the PR industry despite some of our best efforts not to be targeted? Here is the list (for some reason they split it up between “tech blogs” and blogs of more traditional mainstream media):

Top 10 Tech Blogs

1. TechCrunch
2. GigaOM
3. Engadget
4. Gizmodo
5. VentureBeat
6. Silicon Valley Insider (sic)
7. MeriTalk
8. ReadWriteWeb
9. Lifehacker
10 Ars Technica

Top 10 Tech Pub Blogs

1. The WSJ’s Business Technology Blogs
2. The NYT’s Bits Blog
3. BusinesWeek’s Blogspotting
4. CNET Blogs
5. ZiffDavis Blogs
6. Wired Blogs
7. CIO Blogs
8. eWEEK Blogs
9. Network World Blogs
10. InformationWeek’s Business Technology Network Blogs

The survey also produced a list of the most influential tech bloggers, according to PR professionals.

1. Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
2. Om Malik (GigaOm)
3. Robert Scoble (Scobleizer)
4. Walt Mossberg (WSJ/AllThingsD)
5. David Pogue (NYT)
6. Ben Worthen (WSJ Digits blog)
7. Doug Henschen (Intelligent Enterprise Weblog)
8. Saul Hansell (NYT Bits blog)
9. Stacey Higginbotham (GigaOm)
10. Erick Schonfeld (TechCrunch)

I am kind of embarrassed to be on this list (but not as embarrassed as Mike should be—I mean, what a tool). I hope that by publishing it now before the “embargo” I will get kicked off it before it is officially released. Seriously, Engadget’s Joshua Topolsky deserves to be on it way more than me.