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Executive Summary
Introduction
Since the 1980s, Web sites have emerged as a major communication medium between organizations and their publics. As a public relations tool, Web sites have several attractive characteristics: cost-effectiveness, interactivity, multimedia capability, wide reach, and last but not least, direct access to the public, or the ability to bypass mass media gatekeeping. It comes as no surprise, then, that organizations big and small have taken advantage of this new communication environment to create virtual store fronts for their online publics. There is wide agreement among both practitioners and scholars that Web sites are important public relations media. However, online public relations practice has advanced faster than research and scholarship; so although Web sites are widely used in public relations, they are not thoroughly understood.