Stop the Presses: Criticism Against the New York Times Mounts as Newspaper Is Accused of Killing 59 Million Trees Annually

After the New York Times (NYT) published an editorial about bitcoin mining, saying the industry is harmful to the environment, an organization called Stop the Presses Stop the Presses launched a social media campaign against the NYT’s newspaper production. The group’s website, nytimesup.org, claims that the company “kills about 59 million trees a year.”

Activists condemn the New York Times’ physical newsprint production

On April 10, 2023, the New York Times came under criticism for publishing a one-sided “hit piece” on bitcoin mining. Crypto proponents argued that Times reporter Gabriel Dance did not use factual information. Since then, the focus has shifted to the environmental impact of newspaper production at this American news media outlet founded in 1851. A group called Stop the Presses

launched asocial media campaignandwebsiteexposing the current print practices of the news business. The charge is that the New York Times is destroying a significant number of trees to produce outdated physical paper in a digital world.

“The New York Times kills about 59 million trees a year,” the website nytimesup.org details. “They generate billions of pounds of CO2 each year to make the paper that most people throw away. They print their propaganda on paper made from dead trees, but we live in a digital age. This wasteful practice must be stopped.”

Many others share the same sentimentas Stop the Presses. Several people have shared images and information about the issue, tagging the NYT’s Twitter account so that the company is aware of their complaints. One personestimatedthat if the NYT kills 59 million trees a year, “2.832 billion pounds of CO2 will be generated annually.” The person noted that 171 years of newspaper delivery combined would be much worse.

“That means they killed over 10 billion trees and created over 484 billion pounds of CO2,” this individualemphasizedThe number of trees used to make The New York Times since 1851 does not account for the CO2 used by the company’snot taken into account, making 27 newspaper printing plantsfor manufacturing purposes.

In addition, all fossil fuels used in the delivery process and to get the newspapers to the stores are not taken into account; the NYT even has a feature onthe physical newspaper causation that the author acknowledged in a 2009 article