• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 15, 2008

If you are reading this column in the print edition of Media magazine, you may be holding the world in your hands - literally. Sound serious? I am. It is.

The gross weight of the paper stock and ink you are holding at this very moment is approximately 5.8 ounces. Its weight in environmental-damage terms is the equivalent of 1.031 pounds of carbon dioxide. And that's just for the physical print production (paper and printing). It does not factor in all the energy consumed in the writing, gathering and editing of this issue's content or the shipping. We couldn't calculate that, but we know it's considerable. In fact, when I asked Media managing editor John Capone to pass along the calculations we used to determine the carbon equivalent of this issue, he provided me with three pages of paper printouts with his notes and formulas from Environmental Defense, plus a sticky-pad note attached to the pages acknowledging, "I hope you see the irony here."

If you are reading this column online at mediapost.com, the carbon footprint may not be much better and, depending on how you look at it, it may be considerably worse. As Mitchell McMahon, the author of this issue's cover story, discovered, digital publishing may not be as eco-friendly as you might think. Yes, paper-based media is a major contributor of co2, but digital media is nearly its, well, carbon copy. The paper industry burns an estimated 75 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year - most of it from wood, a renewable biofuel. Digital media, by comparison, burns 59 billion kilowatts of electricity - most of it from fossil-based coal. That factoid, ironically, makes Google one of the media industry's worst carbon offenders. That's ironic, because Google portrays itself as an environmental crusader, even as it builds massive server farms consuming oodles of kilowatts of electricity, and oodles more in air-conditioning systems required to keep those servers cool and running efficiently.

To be fair, Google has committed to converting to eco-friendly and sustainable ways of processing digital information. It recently formed renewable energy research and development group REThe New Yorker and Vanity Fair that frequently harp on environmental issues, is actually one of the industry's worst environmental offenders. By contrast, publishers ranging from American Media to Random House have already begun aligning their business procurement decisions with their editorial philosophies, converting much of their printing process to recycled paper fiber and/or renewable sources of energy to produce them. Backpacker magazine recently published an internal assessment of its own carbon footprint and vowed to slash it by 12 percent. What Backpacker cannot reduce through its own production process, it has pledged to offset via investments in renewable energy products.

Okay, so people who publish in green houses shouldn't be throwing lumps of coal. Yes, MediaPost, the publisher of Media and OMMA magazines and a litany of digital news products, is currently no better than Condé Nast. I mean, you can almost feel the planet warming while holding this magazine's heavy paper stock. We're looking into that, too, and I hope to report back on some changes soon. In the meantime, we're going to devote some of our resources - natural and otherwise - toward what we do best: Bringing issues like this to our industry's attention, and hopefully, affecting the way we handle them.