Print has always been dinged hard by those promoting digital communications as the green alternative. And why not? We’ve seen excesses that are so revolting –boxes of glossy annual reports that have to be tossed, multiple-page bank statements etc.
The Print Council has been very sensitive to that in their PR, and has a talking points document called “The fine print” to rebut those arguments.
So this campaign is not surprising. Called Print Grows Trees, it attempts to communicate some aspects of the print industry and its relation to forests. Specifically “to show that print on paper actually helps to grow trees and keep our forests from being sold for development.”
Let’s face it: Many of us who have gone digital are big fans of print; it’s not a simple either/or choice. We buy newspapers and magazines, but avoid picking up brochures and flyers whenever we could download them and read them as a digital file. We encourage people to ‘think before you print’ but we do carry business cards (GreenNurture uses Quick Response tags on business cards to avoid brochures) using recycled paper, printed with vegetable inks.
Print on demand, and Personal URLs (‘those ‘PURLs’) are some of the solutions that almost every printer now offers. PODI, the Print On Demand Initiative, educates members and everyone else about print and social media, QR codes etc. So yes, the print industry has done some good things to erase the dead-tree stigma. This campaign though seems to push the envelope (bad choice of word?) a bit.
It definitely –deliberately–frames the debate as an economic problem-solution and not just an environmental one. Is it a dangerous myth, as Jay Purdue and others suggest, one that “has significant environmental and economic consequences” to say that print kills trees? If you haven’t run into the seemingly oxymoronic term ‘digital deforestation‘ be prepared to hear more about it in the next few months.
Or is Print Grows Trees a symptom of ‘tree guilt’ felt not just the print industry but by all of us when we forget to turn on the double-sided feature before hitting Control-P?
“But it’s when you become the punch line on The Colbert Report that you know you’ve made the big time.”
Today that mentality is shifting, and I really like how this challenge reflects that. It’s called The Power of AND. It’s promoted by a group holding the 
I speak to plenty of young people to whom Facebook is like email –something they leave on and check every few minutes. But they are chatting on other channels as well. If you look carefully some folks even check their phones for incoming mail at …church.
But that’s not the part I was feeling guilty about. He then goes on to talk about how there’s a big difference between joining the conversation and crashing into it.
Unvarnished is still in Beta so unless we try out the service we won’t know what it entails. Maybe it is not another site that attracts dirty linen basket cases. Maybe they do have a great idea, based on their description: That it is going to be “community-contributed, business-focused assessments” about “building, managing, and researching professional reputation” and “professional reviews.” They do advice being fair and balanced.
So it was an honor to have Jason Baer, fellow Arizonan and someone I have been following (check his blog 
Hoipolloireport 