Newspapers and The End of Trees

As we watch the current crumbling of many of our outdated technologies, we can safely say that there is a silver lining in many a dark cloud despite the hard rain that they may forecast. If economic downturns do anything, they certainly have a way of weeding out those companies and enterprises that cannot adapt and change with the times from those that thrive on innovation and imagination.

The economy is like a massive Gene Pool of evolutionary trends, some pregnant with possibilities others, with only a fleeting chance to survive, quickly over-powered by more complex and organized organisms.

As long as it takes for traditional newspapers to come to press, so too things can change over-night making that news stale. And as costly and one-time as advertising appears in print, it is nevertheless gone at the turn of a page, evaporating at the end of reading an issue. With few ways to actually track its effectiveness for customers, online advertising by contrast, can be easily tracked through access to online stats.

So it is tough times for the paper printed media along with other past century technologies. In many ways they have also been responsible for squandering resources, energy and filling landfills by not offering their customers choices by segregating their sections. Long ago I would have expected that I would not have had to pay to drag home the sports or financial sections or any other section I don't read in favour of more selective purchasing of the news, that is the power of a personalized Google News service.

I remember suggesting years ago while working for an alternative paper here on the island (Starlinks Viewspaper) that newspapers convert to floppy disk dispensers based on subsections like sports, financial, lifestyles etc. Now I would probably suggest that debit card operated USB dispensers are probably the way to go if newspapers expect to survive. Afterall, why print at all? better to get a wireless Kindle. Anyone with a personal colour printer knows the cost is ridiculous for ink.

I forget the horrendous number of trees* that it takes to print just one issue of the New York Times, but it is vast and clearly was unsustainable even years ago. So I imagine if more newspapers go bankrupt there are not a few tree-huggers cheering on the side-lines, with a great sigh of relief for the forests and homes of the innocent life-forms which inhabit them.

Nevertheless newspapers have always been a good medium for writers even if they were forced to be overly verbose in being paid by the word or length of their articles. We still often find some great opinions in newspapers and if we're lucky, some objective reporting.

Those days may soon be coming to a close as online social networking, opinion columns, newsletters and blogs spread that broader brush of opinion now open for all to express, publish and be heard electronically. English grammar classes must surely be of thriving interest among today's students.

One can argue that we have lost something in side-lining our professional writers but having them thrown back into the writers' Gene Pool of the Internet will only make them stronger, better and probably a little more creative in marketing their talents.

We live in an inter-connected network of many forms of communication and with multi-tasking we often need more immediate attention to several tasks. Yet, it is still critical that we remain aware of the ramifications of changes, rather than just conscious enough to get by from day to day. Good writers, like successful companies can make the transition to the online world and continue to reach their respective readers regardless of how the news is delivered.

For most, it is then only a question of managing how to market one's work in a sustainable way, whether through subscription or eBooks or other forms of ecommerce.

Paul Marcano
AKA Artist3d

• a cord of wood (wood stacked 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet, or 128 cubic feet) produces nearly 90,000 sheets of paper or 2,700 copies of a 35-page newspaper!
• To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
• Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save 75,000 trees.
• If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
• If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags, you'd get about 700 of them. A supermarket could use all of them in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets there are!
• The average North American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year!
• The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.