Last week there was a rare occurrence at the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper announced a change to its editorial policies. Moving forward, the newspaper will no longer honor news embargoes. The only exceptions are for exclusives or if the news is simply too big to be ignored. This became a catalyst for lively discussion among my colleagues about the changing media landscape and how we should adjust our media strategies to maintain client results.

This news is significant for a variety of reasons. First, it’s more proof the mainstream media landscape has been permanently altered by market acceptance of blogger journalism. Second, it’s also an indication some mainstream outlets are asserting themselves more aggressively in the online battlefield. With news cycles condensed to almost real-time and the consumption of news now a 24×7x365 paradigm, mainstream media are discovering the value of their brands despite the movement of ad dollars to new media. What’s so important about breaking stories? What’s the actual value? Can it be monetized?

The answer is yes it can. What’s at stake here is that the traffic goes to the publication that posts the news first. As competition for traffic and ad revenue intensifies, this makes embargoes all the more fragile. With journalists’ major focus being to break news, a trend is emerging. We are more often seeing a serious decline in the quality of the stories being written – not enough attention to detail, no fact checking, a forgotten hit of the spell check button. We have all experienced the “I don’t need a briefing, I will just write something from the release” situation, which often times results in a follow up “thanks for the story; unfortunately you’ve got some of your facts wrong” scenario. Will this shift towards no embargoes change that? If getting a story exclusively, the hope is that the journalist will take the time to speak with sources, do some research, and put some relevant industry context around the story. It should be noted that many journalists do this regardless of the time frame.

The second implication relates to our clients. For major launches, we invest months into planning, strategy, content development, securing third party references and coordinating analyst briefings to support the messages. As a result, clients expect a high return on investment: multiple press and analyst briefings, and a significant volume of top tier features resulting from them. As more and more publications move away from the embargo, however, this is definitely going to change. A big part of our job is setting client expectations; this will certainly come into play when we need to employ an exclusive strategy for major news. While one thoughtful, lengthy piece in a top-tier outlet can pack quite a punch, a client’s business cannot always be hit with just one publication.

I do not think that this is going to become an industry wide policy shift, but I do think we will see more and more outlets (that have the brand cache to do it) shifting their policies. I am eager to see how far the dominos go with this trend, however, and to further discussions on how this impacts PR.