It's official - more time spent online than reading the press!

So the last it looks like the inevitable has happened. The BBC today covered a story about a Jupiter Research study which has found that people in western Europe spend more time online than they do reading their newspapers and magazines.

This really is something which the PR community needs to appreciate and embrace. Undoubtably there are many within the industry who fully appreciate the importance of online exposure and there are also specialist agencies which will only deal with online public relations. However online exposure is viewable by almost all sectors of society, meaning that when you are assigning resources to target different media there will be a mismatch if you do not fairly consider online sources.

Research undertaken by Media Evaluation Research in their recent White Paper highlighted the priorities which PR gives to different media. From this sample it was found that press was almost universally regarded as the most important media source. The research results by Jupiter are saying that the public take a different view and if you equate time spent reading from the source as a measure of importance then online sources are the leading influencer.