Web publishing: new roles and new partnerships for communicators

New electronic publishing technologies, particularly the World Wide Web, are rapidly displacing traditional paper-based methods. Lower costs, faster turn-around, and access to a much larger and broader audience are among the reasons so many organizations are migrating to electronically published documents. However, the same aspects of this technology that have such great appeal to companies can also make them vulnerable in ways they may not have learned to recognize and manage. Web publishing has greatly changed the roles of both communication professionals and information release/information security professionals. Because available tools make Web authoring easy, anyone can create and publish information with little or no involvement from corporate communications staff. Likewise, the ease with which any desktop computer can become a Web server makes anyone and everyone a publisher and an information manager. In many cases, the people responsible for these servers are not communications professionals; in nearly all cases, they are not trained in information release or information security. This situation can put a company´s image and its competitive advantage at great risk. The paper discusses some of the unique risks of electronic publishing, and describes the changing roles of staff at Pacific Northwest who developed the review and approval process for publishing corporate information on the Web