Start tossing dirt into the hole: the media no longer controls the news. Nobody who's anybody (read that stakeholders) can afford to wait for the radio, CNBC, the evening news, or tomorrow's newspaper to find out what's happening in business today. Thanks to the Internet, every browser is a Bloomberg terminal, not to mention a Merrill Lynch trading desk. Fortunes are made and lost during the commercial break.

Reinforcing what we said in the last issue, companies and their PR agencies can't rely on reporters to disseminate their latest and greatest news. Given the warp speed of the web, they can't even wait for PRNewswire and the news pages on web portals such as My Yahoo!

Now, we aren't saying that traditional media, no matter what format, will disappear. Far from it. There's still a gigantic need for editorial filtering services, not to mention commentary, roundups, trend stories, predictions, investigations, humor, etc. But breaking news is gone, poof, sayonara, auf wiedershen, it's been a great 500 years, thanks for the memories, we'll miss ya, Peter, Dan, Ted, Tom, etc.

So what can a poor corporation do? If you can't beat 'em, clone 'em! Companies that want maximum control over their news, not to mention their vision, positioning and branding, can take the bull by the horns (or the bear by the ears, depending on the stock market's gyrations) and launch their own newspaper, magazine, TV network and/or news portal on the Internet.

Head over to www.ford.com, and you'll notice a box in the upper left corner that invites visitors to "for official Ford news on the Firestone recall, click here." This brings you to the company's "Firestone Tire Recall Information Center," which includes lots of helpful links to everything and anything a nervous driver would want to know, including news releases. This is great. But click to the company's official "newsroom," and you find a 1996-era site that lets you browse press releases by the month they were issued, and that's it…no search engine, no press contacts page, nothing remotely interesting except a come-on to download a free screensaver.

But dig into the archives, and you see dozens of opportunities for Ford to tell its story much more effectively on its own site. For example, many of the "news releases" are actually statements by Nasser and other executives related to the Firestone recall. In addition to the text, Ford could stream a video of these speeches so visitors can see and hear what's being said…a much more rewarding (and revealing) experience than simply reading the words.

The layout of Ford's newsroom is borderline pathetic. The only graphic to be found anywhere in the section is a picture of a hand poised over a computer keyboard. Last time we checked, Ford was in the business of selling cars and trucks, not PCs. Every news story should be accompanied by relevant photographs of products and/or the executives being quoted. There should also be a huge archive of high-resolution images for the media to use to illustrate their stories about Ford.

More importantly, Ford is missing a tremendous opportunity to subtly promote its vision, positioning and messages by laying out the newsroom page more like a traditional newspaper, or at least an Internet news site. Instead of listing nothing more than headlines on the "home" page in a font best described as "small and boring," the company could lay out a page that changed every day, if not every hour, much like daily newspapers such as the New York Times does it. This news page can include real-time information such as the current stock price, as well as the aforementioned streaming video, international news, even the company's current advertising campaigns (both print and television).

The secret to the success of a news site like this is having a full-time editor in charge who can make changes to the site in real time. Given most companies' desire to reduce headcount, what better role for the public relations agency who's writing most of the material anyway?

The bottom line is that stakeholders frantically want to know everything and anything about corporations, and they're going to get that information one way or another. Better to take control and deliver it to them on a platter rather than have them scurrying around chat rooms to find the truth. And find it they will, as Ford discovered the hard way this year.