The Print Council is going on the offensive. With the assistance of a coalition of eight public relations agencies that have banded together to produce pro bono work, The Print Council is undertaking a campaign to remind content producers of print’s virtues. According to a Pressbox article, the work these eight agencies will perform includes writing press releases and backgrounders. One will also provide advertising services.

It’s amusing to think of a campaign to support print resulting in a bunch of articles appearing in newspapers. It could be that one or more of the agencies involved plans to go beyond press releases and backgrounders and tap into the Net, but the brief item makes no suggestion that the agencies plan to pitch bloggers or other online channels.

I’m delighted to see The Print Council make this move. Print continues to be an important tool with a number of attributes not available online. It’s portable, for example. You don’t see people taking their laptops to the beach, to bed, or into the bathroom. (Cell phones have found their way into the bathroom, but not computers.) You can make notes in the margin of a printed document. You can put it into a file folder and retrieve in a decade or two. You can push print at an audience; they must pull Web content. People are inclined to actually read rather than scan long tracts of text in print. Most people finding a lengthy article online that they want to read are inclined to print it out, which is why office consumption of paper is up. I don’t think anybody has tried to calculate the number of email messages and web pages that have been printed, but the it must be staggering. So much for the paperless office. Even my 16-year-old daughter, a digital native, scoffs at the idea of reading a novel on a monitor.

Strategic communicators select their tools based on their strengths, and sometimes print emerges as the best tool for a given communication effort. But strategic communicators also recognize that the best communication efforts integrate more than one channel. Without giving it much thought, I can think of several ways to tap into the blogosphere as part of a campaign to heighten awareness of print’s benefits. Based on the article introducing The Print Council’s efforts, it seems that these eight agencies haven’t considered the online avenue. I hope that’s just an oversight in the article. Print rocks, but I would be sad to see this campaign fail because of an inability to comprehend the importance of the Net and the blogosphere as a channel for getting the message out.