Tikkabik

So I make my living by reporting on breaking Mac news. From day to day, much of my day is spent writing news articles about recently announced products and new technology. There's one thing that makes me grind my teeth about this job: It seems PR people and Web staff can rarely coordinate their efforts.

Almost without fail, every time a press release comes across my desk announcing a new product, I'll visit the Web site and find ... well, nothing. Either the only link I'll find is to an obsolete product the new one replaces, or nothing at all. It's become the exception, rather than the rule, to find that a PR department and their Web staff has actually been able to coordinate a timed announcement so the Web site is updated at the same time as when the PR hits the wire.

Practically anyone worth their salt in this business runs their site using a content management system, and the vast majority of these feature some sort of delay publishing system that allows you to stage an updated page internally and make it "live" at an appointed date and time. So I don't see any excuse for why these Web sites should lag hours or, more often than not, days, after the product is released, except that there's little communication between PR and Web staff, or absolutely no desire to seem organized.

That's why you see more and more stories posted with a disclaimer that reads "As we went to press with this article the company hadn't updated its site with information on the product." I don't want people to think that we're dropping the ball here.