I recently heard someone give the advice that "web" and "print" are totally different, and that not many copywriters can write for both types of media. This is not necessarily true, in my opinion.

I think that web and print are converging to some extent. The tone of voice in print media, for example, is becoming more informal (as in most web writing). This may have more to do with trends in society than with media types.

The bottom line is always building rapport with your reader and (usually) getting them to take some sort of action. You can often accomplish this best by adopting a conversational tone (unless the audience doesn't want you to be too familiar).

More important are differences in the type of marketing material and the audience. For example, a sales letter, whether on-line or off-line, tends to be written in an informal tone of voice as if you are speaking directly to your audience (or even a friend), whereas a white paper might be written in a slightly more formal style. Yes, the sentences in a white paper can be longer and slightly more complex, but the difference is in the type of material (sales letter vs. white paper) more than the type of media (web vs. print). Anyway, even white papers can take on the less formal tone of sales letters as mentioned above. Moreover, white papers are usually downloadable files on websites so they may be scanned/read online or scanned/read offline.

Web is "chunky" but print should be, too. Web copy is typically chunky; it's broken up using bullets, subheads, etc. But I think that print media is becoming increasingly "chunky", too. This is logical since for the most part the people reading web copy are the same as people reading printed materials (with some exceptions, obviously). Everyone "scans" these days whether reading web copy or print copy.

IMHO, there are probably only two major differences between web and print:

1. web is interactive and print is (for the most part) not (and not in real-time at any rate)

2. with web, you may be writing for an additional audience, the search engines. For my views on search engine optimization, please see http://www.paularinaga.com/toolkit-july2006.htm

In the end, it all boils down to creating the right content for your audience. Does that sound like good old-fashioned marketing? You bet!