A year ago, TechCrunch said they were ditching one of the most sacrosanct of journalism practices: the honoring of embargoes.

Now editor Michael Arrington is declaring embargoes officially dead for the media in general.

The trigger? Another site, PaidContent, apparently broke Google's embargo this week on announcing its new SideWiki feature.

"A year ago embargo breaks were rare, once-a-month things," Arrington writes on TechCrunch. "Today, nearly every embargo is broken, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes by half a day or more."

The source of the problem, according to Arrington? Not greedy, scoop-seeking journalists. The problem, he says, are PR companies themselves.

Stress on the PR firms put on them by desperate clients means they send out the embargoed news to literally everyone who writes tech news stories. Any blog or major media site, no matter how small or new, gets the email. It didn't used to be this way, but it's becoming more and more of a problem.

As the economy turns south, PR firms are under increasing pressure to perform and justify their monthly retainers which range from $10,000 to $30,000 or more. In short, they have to spam the tech world to get coverage, or lose their jobs.