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Last week, IBJ made a mistake that caused significant problems for an important organization in Indianapolis and raised the ire of other media organizations locally and nationally. It was by no means our first mistake and certainly won’t be our last, but it’s one I thought was important to discuss here — and to apologize for.
On May 5, IBJ reported that the Indiana Black Expo would be making changes to its Circle City Classic football game, moving it from one that features teams from historically black colleges and universities to one that features high school football and flag football teams. In addition, Indiana Black Expo announced that in 2027, it will host an HBCU basketball invitational featuring men’s and women’s teams from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference and Southwestern Athletic Conference.
(There are several important and thoughtful reasons for those changes, which Indiana Black Expo CEO Alice Watson explains on the IBJ Podcast in a conversation with host Mason King.)
The problem is that the news was embargoed for May 9, four days after IBJ published the story. That means we posted the story on our website and sent an alert to our readers before the organization — as well as its funders, event sponsors and participants — were ready for the news to be shared.
A news embargo allows a company, organization or government agency to share information with a reporter or media outlet with an agreement that it won’t be published or broadcast until a specified time. In the strictest sense, an embargo is an agreement between a media organization and the newsmaker made in advance of information exchanging hands.
That is still the way IBJ negotiates many of the embargoes we agree to. But in practice, it has also become common for organizations to send press releases to media outlets marked “embargoed” with the understanding that the journalists will honor the request.
IBJ did not publish ahead of this embargo purposefully. Several IBJ editors received this press release in our email inboxes and noted the subject line: “Media Alert: Indiana Black Expo Announces Organization Pivot.” Immediately interested, we jumped into the meat of the email. One editor volunteered to write up a quick story and send it out to readers with the goal of doing more with the story after breaking the news.
All of us looked right past the embargo, which was in red at the top of the email:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Embargo: May 9, 2026, 4 p.m.
We sent out the story — and in doing so caused significant and immediate problems for Indiana Black Expo.
It’s hard to apologize enough for a mistake like this. After all, when you alert readers through an email and an app, there’s no way to take back the information. We put a note at the top of the story explaining what we’d done and acknowledging that no other media made the same mistake. CEO and Publisher Nate Feltman and I met with Watson, who explained the work she had to do to explain our actions to sponsors, partners and other media. I called the Indiana Black Expo chair, as well, and offered to contact other media if that was helpful.
Of course, it really wasn’t helpful. The damage was done.
Internally, we are talking about the need — even in hyper-competitive situations — to slow down a beat and be more deliberate about what we’re doing. We’re emphasizing the “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” mantra often attributed to the Navy Seals.
We pledge to do better. And we apologize to Indiana Black Expo.•
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Weidenbener is editor and assistant publisher of IBJ and The Indiana Lawyer. Email her at [email protected].
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