Websites 1, Newspapers 0

In the battle for supremacy between the print versions of newspapers and their own websites I think we can declare a winner.

In fact, we could have declared it years ago, the difference is even the most senior print journalists are recognising the most obvious fact: they lost.

What this means for hacks is that they have long since stopped regarding the website as an irritant – a place where you have to smack up some words just to stay in employment.

For flaks, I think this also requires a change in approach that would be to their benefit.

The PR industry still, mostly, seems to think that the physical paper is the main thing, the real goal.

If I’m offered a decent opinion piece by someone quite well known, the flak wants to know for sure that it is going to make the paper and not just the web.

Increasingly, they have that upside down.

They should be asking that the piece gets a prominent show on the internet, where it has a shelf-life – a decent search function allowing – of forever.

The paper isn’t even tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping these days (the ink ruins the chips, for one thing).

At the Standard, we want our afternoon web offer to be different from, but as strong as, what we did in the paper that morning.

If we hold something over for the afternoon, that doesn’t mean we think less of it, it means we think we can give it a better hit on the web.

The Times, The Telegraph, the FT and increasingly The Guardian are all demanding subscription fees to read their websites.

To justify the fees, the web offer has to be the paper plus some web exclusives.

For prestige reasons, your fancy client might still want to see his name in physical print – we get that

But from a practical point of view, the internet content isn’t less worthwhile than the print work.

Moreover, since the internet has no space constraints, it opens up possibilities for more words, for audio, for video interviews, for nifty graphics, any of which a PR firm might be able to aid us on.

My point is, if we tell you such and such a piece is web only, you should no longer take it badly.

That’s us trying to add value, not take it away.