Head on over to the website of Now This News, a producer of news video content, and this will greet you:

NTN shuttered the website (replacing it with this single placeholder page) back in February. The company’s VP of social media, Ashish Patel, tweeted the news to followers: “We just shut the desktop site down. @nowthisnews to be truly socially distributed media company. Follow us wherever.” Today, NTN relies on Facebook, Twitter, Kik, Tumblr, Snapchat, and a variety of other platforms to distribute more than 50 pieces of content every day, with each video tailored to the platform. You can still find a mobile site and an NTN app, but most of the action happens when people share NTN videos native to the social network they’re using. From summer 2014 to July 2015, views of NTN videos soared from 1 million per month to over 420 million.

NTN is an extreme example of an important trend. Few publishers are poised to abandon their websites, but more and more are figuring out that people reading their articles or viewing their videos is what matters. Getting them to view that content on the publisher’s site, not so much.

Articles (and videos) matter. The publications in which they are packaged do, too, but the degree to which they do is diminishing every day.

This is why The Washington Post will make every scrap of its daily content available through Facebook’s Instant Articles (left). The publishing platform is also being tested by The New York Times among others. They are publishers who recognize that mobile users who tap a link to their articles frequently give up on when it takes too long for the page to load. By publishing directly to Facebook’s Instant Articles platform—and adopting its format—publishers are sure their pages will load instantly. Keeping eyes on the article (and accompanying ads) matters more than driving traffic to the Washington Post mobile website or app.

(Facebook isn’t stopping with Instant Articles. An app reportedly called Notify is in the works. It will “let users subscribe to certain news organizations, dubbed “stations” and receive notifications when those outlets’ websites push out news stories,” according to the Verge. Again, this will enable users to learn about new content through Facebook and open a single article without a stop at the top of the publication’s app or home page.)

Apple introduced its own take on Instant Articles with the announcement it would partner with publishers to deliver their articles through Apple News (right), a native app on Apple’s iconic mobile devices. Not to be outdone, Google announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP), a lightweight version of HTML with heavy restrictions on Javascript that, along with Google caching, will ensure that articles open in the blink of an eye—all within the publisher’s own site.

Snapchat and Twitter are also redefining how news is distributed. Snapchat is experiencing considerable success with Live Stories, photo and video collections that let users look in on live events as curators select content that will comprise the montages. Twitter’s Moments is similar: users tap the lightning-bolt icon (the project was developed under the code name Project Lightning) in order to see collections of tweets, videos, Vines, and photos curated by editors around news and events.

Converging Trends

Several trends are converging to catalyze this profound shift:

• We’re getting our news via link sharing—According to an American Press Institute study, Americans get their news through a variety of means, “from old-fashioned word-of-mouth to electronic alerts and social media. The survey reveals that most Americans are discovering news in more than one way. More than half of all Americans report using between three and five methods of discovery to find out about the news.” While the most popular source continues to be directly from a news organization—and mostly TV news—social media is used by 44% of Americans—and that number is growing. Another study—this one from the Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation—found that 65% of both Facebook and twitter users say they get their news on those social networks, an increase from 52% of Twitter users and 47% of Facebook users responding to a Pew study two years ago.

• We’re using mobile devices for social networking—More than two years ago, Facebook revealed that nearly 80% of US users were mobile. That trend has accelerated globally. Over a third of Facebook’s user access the social network solely on a mobile device, the company said back in January. As people scroll through their Facebook News Feeds—not to mention other networks where news links are shared, including Twitter, WhatsApp and other mobile messaging apps, Snapchat, and more—the desire to get to the news without long load times intensifies.

• The package is growing increasingly irrelevant—On the mobile Net, bound publications have been rendered all but obsolete. Even internal communicators are starting to acknowledge the change, with large companies like ConAgra Foods and smaller ones like Fehr & Peers distributing articles through collaboration networks like Yammer and Chatter—as opposed to the listing of articles on an intranet homepage, a remnant of print publishing—and enjoying increased readership as a result.

Implications for Communicators

What these profound changes in news discovery and consumption behaviors means to publishers is increasingly clear. After all, publishers are taking steps to address it.  The implications for public relations practitioners—especially those engaged in media relations—is less clear, mainly because I don’t see PR and communications professionals taking many steps to accommodate these new models.

Some pathways are coming clear, though. If every company is a media company, as Tom Foremski argued back in 2009, then companies need to recognize the pivot and think more like NTN—or at least The Washington Post—tailoring content for distribution in various social channels. Companies like Coca-Cola. that have developed terrific content sites don’t have to abandon them, but they do need to inject the individual stories into the channels where mobile users will find them, quickly access them, and then share them.

Instant Articles, Google AMP, and other publishing schemes will undoubtedly open up to more than the current select partners at some point, and organizations should be prepared to publish using these channels. Like NTN, they should refine each piece of content to best take advantage of each channel.

The curated approach from Twitter and Snapchat is more problematic. For the human curators at these organizations to include an organization’s content in a montage, organizations will need to create relevant and compelling content the curators will want to include, and even then it’s a crap shoot. Of course, both channels are doing partnership deals. Twitter’s Moments have already featured montages from organizations ranging from Buzzfeed to NASA. Undoubtedly, they’ll be happy to take your organization’s money, too, although the content will still need to be interesting enough to attract viewers. Ultimately, though, these may not be worth communicators’ efforts

None of this means that traditional media relations efforts should grind to a halt; after all, if you manage to place your news in a media article that is published as a Facebook Instant Article (and other formats), it’s not much different getting it into the publisher’s own site. Ultimately, it’s all a matter of “along with, not instead of.” I have no doubt, though, that if we continue as a profession to focus only on the old way of earning media coverage the audience that ever sees them will grow smaller and smaller.