Opinion – Last Friday, we tripped over some information that we felt could be used as great material either for the next James Bond movie or a cheesy TV soap: An American tech journalist tangled up between two big Taiwanese companies and suspicions of industry espionage. We did not end up with a James Bond story, but with a pretty interesting soap opera that provides some insight about the fine line journalists have to walk when dealing with 'embargoed' information, privileged treatment and to what great lengths tech companies go to secure coverage for their products.
In its very core, the chain of events that happened at the end of last week in Taiwan are nothing special for many tech journalists. But you may be very surprised to learn what happens at the backend of today's journalism.
Gigabyte, best known as a motherboard manufacturer, held a Computex preview event last week in Taiwan, with the goal to brief tech journalists about the new products that will be released in the near future. Most of those products covered Intel's upcoming chipsets and apparently some unique power saving features the company has developed for its upcoming products.
Such media events are pretty common in this industry and it is also common that companies occasionally pay for travel expenses, such as flight, hotel and transportation. Some large publications never accept such offers, as it exposes them to bribery accusations. But smaller websites simply don't have the resources to pay for the travel that sometimes is required for comprehensive reporting and building a relationship with the companies we write about. For smaller websites, the choice often is to either not to travel to an event or to accept a "sponsored" trip, which is generally accepted as being ok in this segment of the media industry - as long as there is a clear understanding that these free trips don't automatically buy any articles in return and it remains at the discretion of the invited journalist and publication if and what type of content will be published as a result of the invitation. I also need to mention paid media travel is something that is often expected in other geographies of the world, for example Europe and Asia.
Gigabyte apparently invited 47 journalists from hardware tech sites with the offer to provide information under a non disclosure agreement (NDA) and provide an opportunity for the invitees to "play" with new hardware. We heard that 31 journalists showed up for the multi-day event for which Gigabyte shelled out quite some cash, obviously in the hope of multiple articles published by those 31 publications. How much? Only Gigabyte knows for sure, but our credible sources mentioned that the budget for this briefing, involved travel and entertainment program was about $150,000.
We are often asked by readers what "NDA" or "embargo" means – it is basically a written (or often verbal) agreement between a company and a journalist that information provided will not be published until a certain date. These agreements give companies an opportunity to provide information to a larger group of journalists, who have actually more time to prepare their coverage about an event, such as a product launch. Also, some companies are using embargos to make sure certain information does not leak out before a product launch: If you brief a journalist and put him under embargo, he basically agrees not to write about this topic anymore until the embargo lifts. This practice can be very useful to PR departments and can go a long way. However, it can backfire as well as it actually has prompted many journalists not to agree to embargos that exceed a certain time frame, typically six weeks.
There is nothing unusual here and in fact I am not aware of any tech publication that does not agree to embargos and does not honor them (and yes, even The Inquirer agrees to embargos). These embargos and NDAs are usually kept and most tech editors are under one or the other NDA at any given point in time. Occasionally, you see an NDA being broken: Typically this is not the result of malicious intent, but the result of a human or technical error instead.
The drama unfolds
While TG Daily was not invited to this event, we heard from several colleagues that the event went well, until Friday evening, local time. One editor of a larger U.S. hardware website did not show up to attend a sponsored dinner and an after-dinner-party. He was simply gone and at some point, Gigabyte's staff got concerned, tried to contact him via cellphone (which was unsuccessful) and began to investigate where he might be. Eventually, Gigabyte found out that he had taken a cab with a very delicate destination: The headquarters of Asus, one of Gigabyte's key rivals.
Put yourself in the shoes of Gigabyte's PR team in this moment and you can imagine that this is a very uncomfortable situation for many people. Why would he go to Asus?
Crazy ideas can surface and, believe me, we heard quite a bit. We actually came into the information loop somewhere at this point and heard lots of rumors, ranging from Police being sent after the editor, PR people getting fired, the editor's decision to hide at Asus, his refusal to return to his hotel and advertising on the affected website being canceled. The concerns and hefty reaction were not really a surprise, given the tensions that exist between Gigabyte and Asus. In a recent presentation to journalists, Gigabyte accused Asus of flat out "lying" about their products and their benefits.
After one weekend of phone calls with our sources, we still don't know what exactly happened (and I don't think there will ever be a single person who will have all the details). Common sense suggests that there was no plotted secret handover information to Asus, but there have been some pretty bad judgments on both sides, highlighting unusual realities in our industry and cultural differences that are emerging in global relationships.
Read on the next page: PR habits, Lessons learned