Doesn’t the news seem like hard work these days?

We realized this at RLM PR right after our COO’s wife had a baby and was forced to stay up all night with the kid watching TV (the kid stayed glued to his bottle).

While his three-week-old ate with minimal resistance, our new dad sat there trying to understand the warring nations, SARs, Liberia, Kobe and Scott Petersen from 24-hour TV news. Our friend is educated and patient – so he stayed glued and waited for CNN, FOX and MSNBC to make a point to all the gibberish, only to be told the timeline “was as follows.”

Fortunately for the beat as hell father, a 15-minute morning read of the New York Times got him up to speed on just about everything.

What happened, we wonder, that made educated fathers like our pal start to distrust, dislike and “dis” the TV we all loved the first time we were in Iraq – way back in ancient ‘91? And how did print make such a glorious and timely comeback?

First it’s important to note that TV journalists and producers duly have a choice: they can deliver news that’s fit to print and do it well.

Yet broadcasters feel pressure from their own wartime competitor, the handy Internet. Gosh the Internet was easy to get information from back then!

In the gulf war the difference between broadcast and print was so obvious: CNN unraveled the war just as it happened — even the Iraqis were intrigued! There was no Internet to speak of, and no one bothered to wait for the next day’s news to hit the doorstep.

Those were the days when broadcasters won the battle by running continuous packages and explaining things in depth. It was cool -and the beginning of the decline of the paper.

Today print journalists in our various “fronts” are filing their stories from the trenches and posting them on the New York Times’ site within minutes, so we’re gotten up to speed with no wasted time. The next day the affiliated papers use their space for deep reporting that really explains what happened. The net and the newspaper have, in essence, become a happy couple! As for my exhausted friend, it’s only then he understands what broadcasters were really attempting to tell him the night before.

From our perch this is ironic and almost funny. A few years ago everyone called the daily paper the “dead tree media,” but if you think about it the printed vehicles are probably using fewer trees than their TV brethren. Imagine how many sheaths of script paper are wasted trying to fill in the blank holes on your screen!

Since day one of operation: Iraqi freedom baby and father joined CNN, CNBC and FOX News on wee-hour bottle runs and dad’s had as much success understanding what’s going on as he has getting his kid to go back to sleep. While true that there are more embedded journalists on the front lines than in any war passed – fancy satellite phones and cameras tied to their tired bodies – so much of the TV coverage of this war (and SARS and Liberia and that blasted recall thing) has been a continuous loop of speculation: all timelines of a drama that may just unfold if you keep watching.

We guess this is reality television at its best, repeated footage of soldiers and journalists and their personal trials…all pretty dramatic stories.

As PR professionals this means we have some serious soul searching to do. Here is the conclusion of our “story”:

See, our COO stopped watching one night as one highly-rated dramatic series (”NBC News Goes to War”) went too far in allowing a wounded marine to use an NBC satellite phone to call his mother back home at the same time a chemical attack sent his fellow soldiers scurrying into the bunkers! As far as the father could tell, nothing happened except that the image was sure tense.

As Lt. Chris Collins was telling NBC’s excited reporter how he felt dropping bombs on Iraq the reporter asked Collins’ mom: “How do you feel about your son doing this to that nation?”

This is news! No.

This is propaganda and wallpaper.

The Times and its kind use their ink to further the story. In this case they told our COO how bombs dropping altered international relations, affected the markets, and may reshape the Middle East. It was a welcome respite from TV and for that we better be thankful.

We’ve missed the newspaper’s importance and inspirational influence in our world.

Turns out that while we at RLM PR may love the papers, we may be alone. After the dust settled from Iraq, a readership institution study said the mass audience didn’t join our feelings of joy. The institution rated the performance of television news during the Iraq war as the best news media in many areas. TV news was described as the media that was “most complete, most accurate, most engaging, and that offered the best experts and greatest variety of viewpoints.” Wow.

And a big problem – said the study – is that just as expected, the daily ink-stainers did not target young readers with their war coverage. Gee. Maybe TV wins all. Perhaps the little guy in our COO’s lap wouldn’t have been into the newspaper if he could handle it!

For professionals, I think we need the papers more than ever.