the net in this country is not yet an agenda setter, not in the way that the indo, the irish times, joe duffy, prime time or morning ireland are. hardly even in a small way. even in those rare instances where the net has lead a story in this country, it’s its first occurence in a print/broadcast format that is referenced as its origin (eg indymedia’s coverage of rendition through shannon, which only began to become a story when village magazine cut-and-pasted it).

in ireland, the net is still (largely) read by geeks, freaks and folk looking for cheap flights to some airport about 50km away from where they want to go for a cheap weekend. by and large, the internet in this country (and - to be fair - other countries too) follows rather than sets the agenda. it *is* getting better, least i sound totally negative. a small handful of quality sites are raising the bar for others with aspirations of quality. but it is only a small number, and they’re not yet making an impact on setting the news agenda.

as for bebo, that one-in-five have heard of it through traditional media first rather than online - you’ve got to admire their marketing department, don’t you? straight out of the ryan air school of even bad news is good news.

That being said though, just look at how what ends up on the front pages on a newspaper echoes in eternity in that it ends up being discussed on the airwaves, the Internet and the pub. I wouldn’t be so wuick to rule out traditional media. One of my posts next week even highlights that to a point in that research has shown that one in five people in Ireland who are aware of Bebo heard of it through traditional press.

as an example, abc circ for the irish times is what, 100k? a little bit more? maybe one copy of the paper is read by more than one person, but nobody reads the whole thing cover to cover - realistically, the piece has been read by less than 100k people.

compare that with, say, something that’s freely available on the web (the irish times is ppv, so is no freely available) … *potentially* more people will come across it, allbeit over a longer timeframe.

i know it’s not as startightforward as i’m suggesting - some products (say films and music) would have a higher puter literate audience than other products (i’m stumped for a half-decent example, but am sure you can name loads) and so online references would be of more worth that references in the dead trees format and vice versa. to each product, its most suitable format, wired or dead wood. it’s not an either or game.

but … as the audience as a whole becomes more and more puter literate, the role of the dead trees format decreases. and the measurement of impact in electronic media becomes more important than the measure of impact in traditional media. qed, clipping services will have to adapt to survive and find some way to measure the import of online content. how they do that - what balance they strike between human intervention and computer rules, well that’s the hard question.

All the same, physically taking a copy of the article is worth it because handing the client the article or putting it onto a coverage board is much more impactful in a repitch or new business situation rather than going through online clippings.

wrt impact - there is a point missing. while yes, looking at a newspaper, you get notion as to the relative import of a story becuase of the amount of space given over to it, newspapers and magazines have a limited shelf life. once it’s online, it’s got a long tail, and even the most minor mention might come back to haunt you.

Lets say I was interested in being made aware of new mentions about “Piaras Kelly” that appear online what I would do would be to set us a Google News Alert for the keyword.

If I wanted more then the online experience I could always go buy the hardcopy.

I know this may not have as extensive coverage and may even be delayed but for most this may be sufficient and it may be timelier.