Paul Gillin Says Online Matters More than Print

We've all been there. Your clients' news gets picked up online, but the print edition of the outlet fails to run it. In olden times, clients were unhappy, but these days, it happens much less frequently. My how times have changed.

Paul Gillin explains why in a post today. He mentions an experience with his blog, the mordantly named Newspaper Death Watch, which was mentioned in three media outlets: Jeff Jarvis’s BuzzMachine blog, the lead paragraph of a major feature in The New Yorker and a short opinion piece in the Economist. Gillin goes on to assess the relative impact on his blog traffic and concludes:

Not long ago, online publishers were frequently called upon to defend the value of a mention on their properties. Public relations professionals told me that Web coverage was nice, but their clients really valued a mention in a prominent print publication. I would submit that this scenario has now been reversed. With companies increasingly using the Web for promotion, lead generation, sales and customer support, a link from a prominent website is of far greater value than a print article in a prominent print or broadcast outlet. And as a younger generation of business and consumer readers gathers more of its information online, that value will only accelerate.