Not that long ago, breaking news was easy to handle. Media outlets – ranging from newspapers to television and radio stations – just worked the story and waited for their next deadlines. For papers, it was usually the hot-off-the-presses next edition. For broadcast outlets, it was most often the next newscast.

But with the advent of the Internet, holding any kind of scoop is a risky proposition. Someone could beat you to the punch and break the news before your finishing typing it into the newsroom computer.

Realizing that the competition has become so fierce, newspapers are breaking more of their hot news on their web sites, no longer waiting for their next print editions. Their hard copy editions can include those stories and additional sidebars. 

It seems like ages ago when The Drudge Report broke the news of former President Clinton’s relationship with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Accused by some of “scooping itself this summer, The Denver Post broke the story online that beer magnate Pete Coors had been arrested for drunk driving.

But the most obvious and dramatic recent example of online reporting dispensing with traditional deadlines is the Rep. Mark Foley sex scandal story. ABC News was the first traditional media outlet to report the story – and they did it online -- although an Internet blog broke the story nearly a week earlier. As soon as ABC had the explicit emails online, the congressman resigned. That’s some serious power of the press.

Planning Pro-actively

You’re probably putting your own news online, too.  Press releases, podcasts, even videos, etc., and media covering you are being pinged (or Googled) by their pre-programmed search engines.  But, are you missing news outlets you need that are not aware you have something new to report?  And, if your story is hot and the local newspaper’s deadline is long gone, so the story appears exclusively online, what audience targets might you miss? 

The point is you need to think even more strategically than ever.  Not everyone is geared toward getting news off the Internet.  Audiences critical to your business goals might still depend on the traditional ways of getting their news, especially from the print media.  Of course, the ideal is that the story runs both online and in the newspaper.

A final reminder

With the presence of 24-hour news and the investigative undercurrents that permeate the Internet, there’s a real danger in trying to sit on bad news. In the past, you could prepare for worst-case scenarios and at least know about when things would “hit the fan.” Not anymore. If you have bad news, you need to understand the speed with which it can travel, and either be even faster to get ahead of it, or fast enough to be able to react quickly to it.