This is a very interesting article and I think it points to the main reason its so important to reach the winners:

> If, like Saul Perlmutter (Physics, 2011), you live in California and the call comes, unanswered, in the middle of the night, then it could be the television news vans outside your house that alert you of your prize.

> If you don’t pick up the phone, the ceremony continues without you. The public announcement comes at noon.

Why don't the Nobel people just wait until you've been successfully informed before telling anyone else? Where does this self-imposed deadline come from?

The real question is: why don't they try to contact the recipients during the 24hr period prior to the announcement, at that recipient's acceptable local time zone?

I don't think a Nobel recipient is going to spill the beans on the announcement.

It's a bit unfair to ask someone to keep their mouth shut when they've received one of the most prestigious awards possible in the world. Given that, it's reasonable to assume they'll share with _someone_ during said embargo and once that cat is out of the bag you might as well assume the news will leak. Hence the curtesy call ahead of the general news breaking just a bit beforehand.

Because normally they have hundreds of journalists and scientists onsite a ceremony and don't want to make them wait.

Too bad the winner isn't one of them.

Not everyone wants to travel around the world to be at an award ceremony they only have a small chance of winning.

Since when do you need someones consent to say a thing about them?

You don’t need someone’s consent to say a thing about them.

But they clearly want to tell them, so why are they trying to do it in the middle of the night in a hurry rather than doing it calmly?

Why this self-imposed rush?

Nobel winners are all over the world, regardless of when you pick, there will always be a chance it's "the middle of the night" for someone. With the current time slot that happens to be for people in the US.

They could pick a slot that's during the day in the US, but then it'd be night for someone else. What justifies the US importance to make such a change? Using the timezone of the committee as they do now seems as reasonable a compromise as any...

But why does it need to be done at a single moment? Why not take a day or week to make sure you’ve got in touch with people? There’s no rush except what they create for themselves.