In years past the term "media" commonly referred only to Newspapers, radio and Television. In today's hyper-information world, the term has come to include any entity that distributes a message whether a feature news story or announcement, advertisement, graphic, video or audio broadcast or file.

Unlike the limited media options of the past, today's media comes in dozens of different and often specialized formats such as Weblogs (Blogs), Electronic Magazines (Ezines), Video Logs (Vlogs) such as YouTube, Websites such as ForConstructionPros.com, RSS feeds, e-mail based distribution platforms and literally tens of thousands of business journals, both online and off, trade publications, corporate print newsletters, subscription based newsletters, national, regional, trade and specialty magazines, most of which have an online version, webcasts (TV like internet broadcasts) satellite radio, internet radio and podcasts.

And to further muddy the media landscape, the technology of HD (High Definition) radio now allows traditional, or terrestrial (Non satellite) radio stations to split one signal into two separate ones and broadcast different content on each one simultaneously.

Although the opportunities for winning enormously valuable publicity increases every day as the industry expands, determining who to approach, when and most importantly with what kind of information, can be maddening. Couple this confusion with the limited time most business owners have to spare and creating and managing a publicity campaign can become a daunting if not mind numbing and unpleasant task.

Although the new media does present more opportunities than ever before, many of these new outlets are not appropriate nor would they be effective in promoting a local or regional business since they have more global focus. In other words it does not benefit a contractor in Des Moines to be featured in a news story with national circulation beyond the scope of the local audience.