Piaras Kelly PR – Public Relations in Ireland

Interesting article in the Economist about the Paperless Office. The decade old prediction gradually looks like it is coming true. The reason for this is primarily due to the wave of digital natives coming through the workforce. The article points out that Breedlove & Associates’s clients and employees are turning away from paper:

The clients tend to be young, middle-class families with toddlers; they are good with technology and already pay bills online, use e-tickets on planes, e-file their tax returns and Google recipes rather than using cookbooks. And Breedlove’s 16 employees are in their 20s, native to Facebook and instant-messaging and baffled by the need for paper. Now everybody is happier. Next year the firm expects to be completely paperless.

An interesting parallel could be made with traditional media. With Irish media outlets such as the Irish Times and the Irish Independent now free and easily accessible, it will be interesting to see whether the nation’s youth will buy the print versions when they are interested in following the news and can afford them, or if they will continue to read them free online.

In this context it is great to see papers like the Irish Times expand their online editorial offer. Over the last year, the online news team has been incorporated into the overall newsroom and news on the website has changed from breaking news format to offer text and audio analysis. I got a slight shock a couple of months ago when I spotted an article online during the course of the day relevant to one of my clients and followed up with the journalist to see if she wanted to talk to the client for when the final article appeared in the next day’s newspaper. She quickly replied that the article wasn’t going into the paper, it was for the website only. This was surprising as I wouldn’t have ordinarily expected her to contribute online. The same newspaper’s coverage of the Budget was great, offering analysis and updates by the minute on the business desk’s new blog and Twitter feed.

Much like the concept of the Paperless Office though, change doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t hear many of experts that predicted the death of print media within five years chirp up about their prediction anymore. The biggest threat to print media isn’t the declining circulations, but rather the freefall in advertising that has accompanied the credit crunch.