1.Certainly does seem ignorant and arrogant to embargo information that, ultimately, you *want* people to write about. The only time I would ever begin to expect a writer to respect an embargo is if I worked for a company like Apple, in which case I'm sure a writer would be really, really upset if we started leaving him or her out of the loop for breaking an embargo.

Short of that very rare situation, I don't see the logic.

2.Poorly thought out, or just naive? I assume that they put out an embargoed release to give writers time to put together a decent story if they chose to write about the contents of the release. It's sort of sad that this is becoming, as you note, impossible to do.

Embargoes assume that the media receiving such releases are concerned with providing top-quality coverage to their audience, and thus will appreciate getting something early and respect the embargo. It's unfortunate that this idea is on the decline.

3.John's spot-on about the classic assumption of the embargo, which is of course to allow journalists who have a track record of giving news quality treatment the time to write a considered release.
But, "given today's communications landscape," as you note, Shel, it's obviously very risky to widely distribute embargoed releases.

If the embargo is serious, then the distributor should have been selective in providing only to journalists and/or bloggers who would respect the embargo in order to do a serious piece.

The fact that they would shotgun it without having preceded it with a personal contact to be sure the recipient is a) interested in the news and b) would respect the embargo, makes me wonder if they were really serious about the embargo at all. Increasingly in such cases, you have to wonder if the embargo isn't a decoy and what they're hoping for is a flurry of advance news briefs and mentions, almost a kind of pre-release "leak" scenario to generate buzz in anticipation of the actual release itself.

4.I think that you have a point of how the communication landscape has rendered the rationale obsolete. It's pretty much the same story, though, with copyright, intellectual property, and any other industry where the majority of higher-ups obtained the majority of their experience before the interwebs popped up. Oh well, they'll learn in time.

5.One thing: your example is a great one of when not to embargo. Other examples are a matter of timing; I am setting up a media tour for a launching product, including face-to-face meetings. Because in-person demos require scheduling, a demo is necessary. I am sticking to embargo-friendly outlets of course, some of which are blogs by the way, but in this case I need to stick to a uniform date for a coordinated launch.

On the other hand, it's not just blogs that break embargos. The whole news industry is so competitive that we have to have realistic expectation as to whom to trust, and whether or not the embargo might be broken.