[ig1]

Yes, but they have strong motivation not to abuse it. I've seen one case where an news org broke an embargo due to fat fingering a release, that news org lost early access privileges for a year as did every sister company that belonged to the same news group.

If you specialize in financial news losing numbers is a huge deal, you'll lose thousands of customers over it. And when those customers are often $1000/month subscribers it can easily mean a financial loss of tens of millions of dollars.

Within news organizations the information is typically restricted to 1-2 named individuals who have restrictions on trading. If they leak the information they can generally be criminally prosecuted.

[niggler]

R.R. Donnelly is still kicking even though they released google's earnings early: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/18/us-google-results-...

[ig1]

I'm talking about government figure releases (employment, inflation, etc and the like).

In that case it was probably just a contractual issue between Google and their printer, to the wider market it would have been the same as if Google had accidentally released their numbers early.

(Actually even in the governments case it's still a contractual issue, it's just that governments have huge power by withdrawing early access rights)

If RR traded on those numbers they would have violated criminal insider trading law.