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This interview is part of the Future of Journalism interview series.
By Sean Dougherty, Vice President, Stern + Associates
 The future of journalism is on the Internet – the best, most accessible, most free, most versatile and open communications medium in history.
The signs of the times are coming faster than ever and at the rate we’re going, print journalism’s primacy among the literate and influential could soon be as distant a memory as Burma Shave billboards.
The Detroit Free Press and Detroit News are about to suspend daily home delivery, cut back their print editions and rely on the Internet as their primary delivery mechanism.
FinancialWeek recently followed the Christian Science Monitor into online-only reporting.
The New York Times’ David Carr recently reported on a thriving print newspaper that shuns the web in favor of building personal, high-value relationships with advertisers. The catch? The Tri-City News is a small-circulation weekly with 3.5 employees covering the Asbury Park, N.J., region. One imagines that Carr looked for a more powerful example. A more persuasive anecdote at The Times would be the fact that it dropped its experiment with charging online readers a fee for its opinion content when it became clear that hiding its best writers behind a pay wall made them invisible.
Today’s leaders read most of their news online. Even for old lions who don’t like computers, the people who do the research reports that get filtered up to them do that research online.
Within the public relations world that I inhabit, there is a generational shift underway. For PR people who came into the field before the Internet was ubiquitous, online placements feel like getting into a safety school when you aspired to go to an Ivy. Clients presented with an opportunity to secure high-profile, message-driven coverage in a BusinessWeek.com, WSJ.com, or Forbes.com reflexively ask “Why can’t we get something in the print edition?” before asking themselves why a print placement would be more valuable.
I am one of those old timers and I love print newspapers, ink stains and all, but that is no reason to ignore reality – the value of the placement is the journalist’s brand and reach, not whether or not the information originally appeared on paper.
Online articles get forwarded, increasing influence. Bloggers prefer to blog about topics where they can link through to what they are commenting on. Online articles are more easily fed into your own distribution channels, whether it is a personal blog, e-mail distribution list or Web site. While streamed video clips are usually associated with sketch comedy like “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show,” it is unlikely that Harvard University Professor Michael Porter’s recent interview on “The Charlie Rose Show” was seen live as often as it was viewed online based on the number of bloggers who linked to the segment.
None of this is an argument that news will cease to be a valuable product, any more than the bankruptcy of an airline or car company means people will no longer fly or drive. The news companies need to revise their business models, but their work is still relevant. They can survive a planned transition to electronic delivery just as the original radio companies managed the transition to television. Print and online news can strengthen each other. A personal example illustrates how.
Recently, when doing my morning read of the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, I flashed past the editorial page and noticed a review of a book about what it would take to live on Mars. Mentally, I filed it in the “read later” folder and then went about checking my other online news sources. One of them was a blog post by the reviewer, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com, noting that he had an article in the paper. Once I realized a writer whose opinion I respect had written the review, I went back to the paper and read it. In this admittedly anecdotal example, Robert Zubrin, the author of “How to Live on Mars,” got closer to making a sale because of the blog post by the reviewer than he did by getting a full-column editorial page review in the nation’s second-largest circulation print newspaper.
On a less cheery note, the Rocky Mountain News faces closure next year. Its employees have launched a HYPERLINK "iwantmyrocky.com" web site to solicit community support for saving it. Even they recognize that the most effective means of grabbing attention and galvanizing a community around a problem is to use the web.
Sean Dougherty, vice president at Stern + Associates, is a veteran corporate and business-to-business public relations strategist specializing in translating complex concepts into media-friendly messages and storylines. He can be reached at
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