Three trends are building upon each other, like three little waves joining to form one big wave.
First, people are shifting how they get their news. They're moving from TV, radio and newspapers to web-based news -- and not just on their computer, but on portable devices like smart phones, tablets like the iPad and other devices.
Second, web ad revenues now exceed newspaper ad revenues for the first time, and many of the places were people get their news online aren't the original source for the reporting, but a news aggregator, like google news or Huffington Post, that takes original reporting from a traditional news sources and summarizes or condenses it.
Third, news aggregators are taking their new found audiences and ad revenue and doing something with it: they're moving into the news gathering business themselves.
These trends present great opportunities to reach your audiences. It also presents logistical and technical problems.
Logistically, it's hard to keep track of all the media outlets you need to cover today.
Even doing PR in a medium-sized state means maintaining a long list of web sites, phone numbers and emails for all the newspapers, TV stations, blogs and radio stations in that state.
The shift to online news only fragments the media market even more. Public relations pros will need to be on a constant watch for new sources of online news, whether it's new players or disruptive technologies like Twitter, because the only thing that's certain in the world of the online news and web is constant change.
There are also technical problems.
It's won't be enough to write material and send it out by email. Dealing with the new platforms means finding software solutions.
First of all, you need to make it easy to hit SEND once and have it published in many places. You can do this with many blogs now, such as WordPress, with anything posted on your blog also sent to Facebook and Twitter, yet this problem will become more important and more complicated with the growing power of news aggregators.
Secondly, the internet giants all use different systems. So do Huffington Post, Fark, Drudge Report and similar news aggregators.
There are tools out there, like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, that help you post in multiple places.
These tools will have to become more sophisticated, and finding one that works for you may become just as important as writing great copy.