The Stranger and the Weekly combined print about 200,000 copies per week, 52 times a year, and each copy averages about 0.7 pounds. Multiply these numbers and you get roughly seven million pounds of newsprint each year. Compare that to the Free Press, which prints roughly 5,000 pounds per year, or less than one tenth of one percent as much.

But the real carnivores in the local newsprint jungle are the dailies, the Times and P-I, which, including advertising inserts, print roughly three or four million pounds of newsprint per week, or roughly 200 million pounds per year.

Let's say there's roughly a million people living in the areas serviced by the Seattle dailies and weeklies. That means that about 200 pounds of these papers are consumed by each resident per year. So Seattleites are consuming far more than their own weight in newspapers each year.

And if you weigh the advertisements against the news content, you'll find that about two-thirds of the weight of all this newsprint is ads. So Seattleites are using about 130 million pounds of tree fibers each year for the privilege of reading about things like Nordstrom shoe sales and penile enlargements.

Advertising funds most newspapers, and makes them either cheap or free, however the cost of these ads is included in the price of the goods you buy, so the consumer always pays for ads in the end. Seen in this light, advertising money is in large part simply a sort of corporate donation to the press, a donation which often has corporate strings attached. The advertising industry is also thus a kind of warped make-work program which forces many artists to compose corporate mottos, shoot corporate photos, and design corporate logos in order to earn a living, at the national expense of millions of tons of trees per year.

The only alternative funding sources for newspapers is subscriber support. Let's face it, Bill Gates isn't going to throw millions at the Washington Free Press and say "Keep doing what you're doing!" That's why, dear reader, we at the Free Press need your individual, personal subscriptions and donations, in order to keep alive this brand of non-corporate independent journalism.

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Contents this page were published in the May/June, 1998 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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