Useful blog post here from Jon Slattery covering recent research on the decline of newspapers, which got me thinking about the impact on business PR.

Nothing revolutionary there, you might say – after all, we’ve been reading about the death of print newspapers for the last 18 months.

It’s interesting to note, however, the reversal of fortunes for newspapers online.

This article concerning the relative boom of user readership and visits to the Mail Online news site, whilst the Mirror has seen a 25% increase in online visitors. Good news?

Possibly, but what does the death of print newspapers mean for you? How does this affect your business PR? I have a few suggestions.

Let’s do the maths, and overview the route forwards based on the law of probabilities. These are my questions:

* If print newspapers are dropping like meteors, with tumbling circulation figures, is traditional PR virtually redundant?

* If online news sites are gaining more hits, interest and visitors, is it worth putting your business PR to them instead?

* If more journalists are using social media platforms such as Twitter to source news, is it worth being present there?

I am hoping you answered ‘Yes’ to all three questions – I know I did.

There’s still a place for offline PR, of course, but if it doesn’t compliment and acknowledge the increasingly-important part being played by online PR and social media engagement, I’d suggest your business PR could well suffer the same fate as British newspapers. Tired, worn out, irrelevant and unread.