This week’s issue of PRWeek includes our first annual Media Survey, produced in association with PR Newswire. There is a lot of great data in the survey, and I’ll let you read most of it in the feature. But I’ll be picking up on some of the key themes this week, starting with the conundrum of the editorial workload.

We asked journalists if they are being asked to work harder today than they were during the past few years and 57.3% said “yes”. By comparison, only 10.2% said “no”.  And what are they being asked to do? It doesn’t take a media genius to know that the work is expanding online.

PRWeek, too, has reporters now running online exclusive sections, and contributing “cutting room floor” content to online feature extensions  - the journalistic equivalent to the deleted scenes on DVDs. Now this extra video content is actually being produced with the sole purpose of going in the DVD only. The same is happening in reporting.

I think we have struck a very good balance at PRWeek, balancing the needs of the print edition, the website, the blogs, the e-newsletters, the podcasts, and online exclusives. But as innovation continues to occur online, it will be difficult to resist the temptation to pile more and more onto existing editorial teams, at the possible expense of quality and depth.  When video is ubiquitous, will reporters be asked to do both broadcast and narrative versions of their stories? It’s coming, I’m telling you.

We are fortunate in the trade world that there is not an unlimited universe of content that will be relevant to our audience. Sure, we could get a lot of hits online if we started posting videos of Britney Spears  pumping gas, but we would ultimately lose our core audience. Mainstream media have no limitations to their content possibilities, and will have to police both their staff tolerance and their content relevance vigorously, hopefully avoiding burnout in either camp.

I have The New York Times delivered to my home every morning, and of all newspapers it is the one I most thoroughly read every day. Not because I get it at home, but because its content is enabled on my mobile device (a Treo). My online newspaper reading is confined utterly to what I can easily access on the Treo. I am very far from an early adopter of technological advances, so I have to think that if I’m doing it, a sizable percentage of the population is doing the same.

The reading I glean from the print edition is what I need to get through the day at work -Front page, first section, editorial page, political section, business section. Anything else I can get through during my commute is an added bonus.

But tonight, on my way home, I am looking forward to reading a story that I didn’t have time to get to in print, about the . Previously I would have kept the science section, and 9 times out of 10 would have lost it before the day was through, meaning I would never have got around to reading it at all. Now I bookmark the online page on my device and revisit it later in the day.  Clearly I’m not the only one who has found this story to be must-read, as at the time of this posting it was number three on the NYT’s “most e-mailed story” ranking.

Since I discovered the mobile NYT I have tried to find other compulsive reads through this medium. Unfortunately, there aren’t many, which surprises me. There definitely aren’t many as easy to navigate and as appealing as the Times’ version. When will others catch on?

The Wall Street Journal this week about the counterintuitive nature of rising paper costs amid a shrinking consumer appetite for the newspapers themselves.

According to the WSJ, it is the paper industry’s efforts to anticipate the extent of the newspaper industry’s woes that creates the continuing rise in prices. Paper companies are controlling supply by “idling machinery in their mills and, in some cases, selling them”, giving them more leverage in pricing. Some newspapers, like the Journal and The New York Times, moved to a smaller web width to reduce costs.

As the article points out, the two biggest costs for newspapers are people and paper. Newsrooms have shrunk, as have the publications themselves. And yet somehow it is still inconcievable that print publications will eventually be replaced by their online counterparts.  

In this week’s , its “digital issue”, former PRWeek media editor Matthew Creamer takes on the debate over the Internet’s value as an ad medium. Creamer makes the point that marketers are now media owners, and their competitive base includes media companies as well as their traditional sector competitors.

As Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB, points out in the piece, “I think today you have much more of a triangulation where marketers can invest directly in going to consumers, obviating the need for media owners. They are not necessarily the client of owners and, in some cases, they are their competitors.”

“In other words,” Creamer writes, “marketers can build websites that do cool, useful stuff”. He cites Johnson & Johnson’s BabyCenter as an example of a marketer providing rich wells of information to new parents, in direct competition with consumer titles that have long written the same kind of articles for their readers.

For media brands, it is not enough to differentiate yourself from marketer media by harping on the value of independent journalism and the credibility of third-party, earned editorial coverage. Information will be judged not so much by its source, as by its authenticity and relevance.

So, exactly how many stories does it take to cover the Spitzer resignation? today had five big stories covering everything from the press conference to the identity of the alleged prostitute, as well as two opinion pieces.

That’s a lot of ink on one governor’s shenanigans. Certainly the reverberating shock value of such a precipitous fall of a public figure warrants significant coverage. But the overlapping of facts in the various stories and the dominance of what is, at the end of the day, a New York-state related story on A1, is gratuitous. I suggest the real motivation lies in the detailed piece on the time line of events that led to his downfall.

A telling paragraph:

“Later that day, reporters at The New York Times learned of the unusual presence of three lawyers from the corruption unit, including the boss of that division and an F.B.I. agent from one of the bureau’s public corruption squads. The public corruption units often look at the conduct of elected officials.”

and then:

“Within hours, the reporters were convinced that a significant public figure was involved as a client of the prostitution ring.”

In other words, “We had the story, but didn’t get a chance to break it in print before Spitzer was already organizing his press conference”. It is deflating to have real scoops break before you can get them into the paper, no matter how powerful the online version of your publication is. One reason is that no matter who was first to the story online, few people actually notice it because the story will quickly migrate to other sources. Break it in print, and they all have to link to your story, at least until their own reporting gets into gear. Break it online, and the conventions of attribution are less rigidly adhered to by other media.

Lately I am repeatedly spammed by two different groups - photographers and SEO “experts”. The latter will typically send an email with the subject line, “your website”, and the e-mail will say something like, “Hey, we’ve seen your website, and it’s good. But you could get a lot more traffic if you knew about the SEO tools used by top marketers around the world. We’ll give you a free consultation…”

The former sends me e-mails with generic cover letters that invite me to check out the link to their online portfolio. Not long ago had one photographer’s solicitation that read he was “tan, rested and ready for action”.

Clearly I am on a list, and it is a pretty good list, because I do purchase photography services, as well as work with web vendors. So why such pitifully inadequate or inept appeals for my attention?

Since I took on this new job, I get the feeling that there’s a bit of confusion about the role of publishing director. Here’s hoping I can clarify it. Some titles have “publishers”, which are basically sales directors, focused entirely on the commercial side. But the precedent for publisher actually goes across the title. In my role, both the editorial and commercial sides of the business report to me.

Who runs PRWeek editorial? Keith O’Brien, editor-in-chief. He and his team will be deciding the PR Power List, Editors’ Choice, each week’s stories, the Agency Business Report profiles, and everything else to do with the editorial content of the print and Web editions.

Who runs PRWeek advertising sales? Joanna Harp, our new advertising director. She and her team are working with clients on their marketing plans across all of PRWeek’s products, including the print magazine, the Web site, the e-newsletters, PRWeek Contact, and our various events.

So what do I do? My role is to work with both sides of our publication to forge the strategy for PRWeek. That means developing ideas for partners that are working with us to meet their marketing objectives, as well as ensuring the high standards of our content across all platforms. It means coming up with new ideas that will educate, inform, and promote the industry, and the brand, to the most critical stakeholders.

The job give me me the scope to drive an increased awareness of the role that PR is playing for today’s most sophisticated organizations and corporations. PRWeek, which this year celebrates its 10th anniversary, entered the US market at a time when the PR industry was poised for great change, and it is still evolving.

My job really means figuring out where PRWeek goes next, 10 years more and then some. We’ve done some great stuff recently, with the relaunch of our Web site and the Target Green conferences, just to name a few. My new job requires me to never be satisfied with those achievements, though, and constantly push for innovation. It’s a great time to be here.

Spitzer’s public admission of links to a prostitution ring is a boon for the bloggers who yearn for page views, and for readers with and endless appetite for salacious updates. But mostly it’s a win for the traditional media that does the tough reporting in the first place. Because while blogs will add their own view, and no small amount of snark when called for, the links to the original stories are a huge part of the appeal. 

On an otherwise indifferent day for Gawker.com, page views on just the that the Spitz was about to hit the fan reached over 17,000. The second most popular posting, about a new book on finding love in New York, garnered a comparatively puny 6,176 page views.

The dilemma for those in the traditional media is how much to cultivate the blogosphere’s yen for sexy links by creating content and stories that feed that particular beast. The more traffic your Web site gets, the better it looks to readers and advertisers, obviously. So throw together some rehash of the Saga of Britney and you’ve got yourself some respectable numbers, courtesy of the gossip blogs.

Welcome to my new blog, which will look at the intersection of media and marketing. Until recently, I was editor-in-chief of PRWeek, and now I am the title’s publishing director. I am fortunate now to be able to look at the brand of PRWeek holistically, and be its advocate, rather than just the journalist/advocate for the PR industry.

This blog is an important part of the job. The publishing environment is brutal, ever-changing, and unpredictable. That’s what makes it so exciting, frankly. No one media organization has hit on the magic formula for unqualified success in this new world order. 

Yet much of the public conversation about media strategy is taken up by journalists who have never had to manage anything more than their own deadlines and contacts. With this blog, I aim to start a discussion on what is working and what isn’t, in that place where marketing and media pressures converge.