More Bad News for Dead Tree Types

Many CEOs from the largest U.S. companies expect that by 2005 they will be turning to the Internet rather than newspapers for news, according to a survey released by Deloitte & Touche.

The survey, conduced by Yankelovich Partners, asked more than 400 senior execs to predict how their work environments would change over the next seven years. The majority thought developments in the Internet and technology in general would have a strong impact on the way they do business.

Only half of those polled said that daily newspapers would be an important source of business news (and presumably advertising) in 2005. Instead, they expect to turn mostly to Internet information services (91%), corporate intranets (80%) and email (74%).

The executives reported that they mostly (87%) already use the Internet to get the message out about their companies. Of those, 98% use it to provide information on their companies and 81% use it to communicate with other companies. More than two-thirds (69%) of respondents’ companies were said to use the Internet to sell products and services online.

Sixty-one percent of the executives polled predicted that technology will be responsible for the most significant changes in their companies between now and 2005 Media Daily report.