Article: As Environmentalism Grows, Online Publishers Go Green
By: Bob Tedeschi
Source: The New York Times

“Going green” is one of the latest trends in the business world — in the face of a recession, focusing on reusing and recycling just sounds like the right thing to do to most people, and many businesses are taking advantage of the trend to push new products and services. This isn’t the first time this has happened, or the last — environmentalism seems to be a cyclical trend that shows up every 10 years or so, generally around the time that the economy is struggling.

Full disclosure time: I am for conservation and for cutting down on trash and waste. I am for protecting natural preserves, and I love the idea of clean and efficient energy, like hydrogen fuel cell batteries. I believe climate change is a reality, but I’m not convinced that it’s the fault of industry, and I think that nuclear power is a safe and smart alternative to coal power. I think about the environment in my daily routine, and I drive a small, used, fuel-efficient car and try to re-use plastic food containers when possible.

With that said, I’m not an environmentalist, because I think for myself, and I understand that most of what environmentalists preach is feel-good nonsense. (Here’s a great article from Wired that explains what I mean here, point by point.) That’s why I’m going to present today’s article not as something I feel is smart and insightful, but rather something I feel is manipulative marketing.

The article talks about how many publishing companies, particularly magazines, are attempting to get onboard with the green revolution by offering more of their articles online. For example, the Washington Post Company started up a website called Sprig.com that offers environmentally friendly articles and videos for women:

Sprig.com features articles in five categories: food, fashion, beauty, home and lifestyle, with videos liberally mixed into each section. In the beauty section, a video features an eco-friendly manicure and pedicure, while in the food section, visitors can watch organic cooking demonstrations. The site will post about six new articles a day, written in a way one might characterize as Green Lite.

“We’re targeting this to the 95 percent of people who want to be 5 percent green,” said Jeanie Pyun, Sprig’s editor in chief. “Not the 5 percent of people who want to be 95 percent green.”

Did you catch that? The website is not interested in changing peoples’ habits and helping them “go green.” Instead, it’s just interested in offering content to people who are riding the trend — the same people who are going to abandon “going green” when the economy is back on the upswing and conservation doesn’t seem necessary any longer. This is not a publishing company trying to be socially conscious; this is a publishing company trying to market its products and make a few bucks off web-based advertising:

One advertiser already lined up is the Clorox Company, which produces a range of consumer products including Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressings. Sumona Pramanik, associate marketing manager for Hidden Valley, said she chose Sprig to carry ads about her brand’s new organic ranch dressing partly because Sprig is aimed at a mainstream audience.

“Their positioning as a stylish green site made them a perfect fit,” Ms. Pramanik said. “And having that female target consumer, that’s definitely a place where we play.”

The article also mentions why the magazine publishing industry is “going green”:

“If you looked at 10 new markets to go after right now, this would probably be close to the top, because the number of companies advertising green stuff will explode in the next couple of years,” said Josh Bernoff, an online media analyst with Forrester Research, a consulting firm. “And having an established company behind it is a good way to kick something like this off.”

One thing that the article doesn’t mention, but which I would suggest is quite relevant, is the fact that magazine and newspaper sales are slumping right now as more and more people turn to the internet for their information. Publishing companies who produce this kind of media have traditionally been bloated due to the heavy profits they’ve earned from advertising. Now, more and more companies are finding cheaper and easier ways to advertise products on the web, and magazines and newspapers are losing massive amounts of revenue and finding themselves forced to let nonessential staff go. They’re looking for anything they can hold on to now, and a trend like environmentalism seems like just the ticket to most.

But think about this for a moment. Are publishing companies who publish periodicals really the companies people who are concerned about the environment should support? The argument can be made for an organization like National Geographic, since they are socially responsible and have environmentalism as a core value. But many of these other companies create products with a high expectation of waste. Magazines typically only sell 33-50% of their newsstand copies, and the rest are promptly destroyed when the next batch arrives. Newspapers are one of the most wasteful products in publishing since they’re designed to be disposed of daily. While the unsold product is recycled, recycling is itself an energy-intensive process that isn’t able to turn 100% of the input into usable output, and the cost of recycling makes it cheaper for media companies to use new paper than recycled content.

And what about websites? Computers are fairly energy efficient, but the old CRT monitors many people are still using are not. Laptop computers use dangerous batteries, as do PDA smartphones and standalone eBook readers. Computers also heat up rooms and offices, requiring air conditioners to be run more frequently, which in turn consumes even more energy. Granted, websites create less waste than paper products, and electronic periodicals are more environmentally friendly than paper ones, but the tradeoff is higher energy consumption and increased production of electronic devices, most of which last consumers for a year or two before they’re replaced.

Now, I don’t want magazines, newspapers and computers to vanish because they’re not 100% eco-friendly; that sort of thinking is the reason that most people aren’t willing to commit to this “going green” stuff past a certain point, because it isn’t realistic. I simply want people to understand that this “going green” stuff is just a smokescreen that’s being used to sell things. As a publisher who is producing a series of children’s books about nature, I’m definitely planning to talk about conservation and wildlife protection. But I don’t want to do it in a phony way, that’s designed to sell books and nothing more. I want people to really think about nature, and to ask themselves if it’s part of our responsibility to protect it as we develop our own society.

I’ll close this article with this thought: there is a big difference between being socially conscious and being a part of a trend. If a publisher wants to take advantage of the “going green” phase, now’s the time to do so. But when the trend is over, and consumers return to wasteful excess, will the publishers who once preached “going green” be able to stay consistent with their message… or will they be the ones leading the charge to consume new products as often as possible?

-SJJ

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