Announcing Events Already Underway

24 August 2004: Big Minds Gather to Discuss Ultra-Small Technology at NASA, NASA ARC

24 August 2004: Planetary Probe Experts Gather at NASA to Discuss Exploration, NASA ARC

Editor’s note: The first of these NASA ARC press releases (“Big Minds”) was sent out by email at 1:33 pm EDT yesterday. It announces an event at ARC that will be held from 24-26 August. By the time this press release went out the first day of the event was already underway.

The second release (“Planetary Probe”) refers to a meeting, but no start date is mentioned. The press release simply says “this week”. When you go to the website listed in the release you find out that the meeting that this press release is encouraging reporters to attend actually started the previous day (Monday). Given that this second release was sent out yesterday at 5:48 pm EDT, two of the meeting’s four days had now passed.

I am totally mystified as to why Jonas Dino, the NASA ARC PAO person listed on both releases, would think that any reporter would be able to make advance plans – or even last minute plans – to attend these meetings given that “advance word” came out after the fact. It would be hard enough for local reporters to react. It would simply be impossible for reporters living elsewhere in the U.S. to make plans to attend. Isn’t the whole point of these press releases to alert the media ahead of these events? Instead, NASA PAO is alerting the media to events they won’t be able to attend.

ARC PAO apparently does not care if the media knows about the things it does in advance.