A longtime resident of Uxbridge, Ted Barris has written professionally for 40 years - for radio, television, magazines and newspapers. The "Barris Beat" column began in the 1950s when his father Alex wrote for the Globe and Mail. Ted continues the tradition of offering a positive view of his community. He has written 16 non-fiction books of Canadian history and teaches journalism at Centennial College in Toronto.
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Paper weight
Most Saturday mornings, when we rise and shine around our house, I head outside for one of my weekly rituals. I trek down the driveway and retrieve the weekend newspaper. It's usually not hard to find - even in the snow - because it's such a huge package inside a plastic bag. It's got about eight or 10 regular sections in it, from world news to the insight section to the latest in condos (which frankly, I can take or leave). But there's so much paper in that edition of the Star, that I often joke to my wife:
“Here it is, my dear,” I say, “your tree.”
Most Saturdays, following my retrieval of the newspaper, I think about the volume of newsprint that we consume each weekend. I have to admit, it's a bit embarrassing. And then I think about our consumption of newsprint times the newsprint consumption of everybody in the GTA and it truly must cost this planet a good size tree grove every weekend. Were I not a writer and journalism instructor who needs to read as much news and information as possible to prepare for the coming week's classes, I would feel horribly guilty. But then I'm not responsible for the bag of newsprint we get each week from our cross-town competitors.
I think it's about a year ago that the rival newspaper in town - the Times Journal - began enclosing more than just an assembly of the local and regional news, but instead, perhaps four or fives times as much newsprint wrapped around its news in the form of flyers, cardboard inserts and advertising supplements. I was astonished the first time I retrieved this bag of ads. The enclosure seemed to defeat the purpose of the newspaper itself; the news seemed to get lost amid the advertisements.
Ironically, about the third or fourth month of these bulky end-of-driveway deliveries, I got a phone call from a pleasant-sounding Metroland representative.
“Did you receive our newspaper this week?” she asked.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Not sure what you mean,” she came back.
When I began to explain to her that I could barely find the news because of all the flyers wrapped around her newspaper, she seemed surprised that I found that odd and even offensive. I tried to explain to her that I didn't want all those flyers, but that I wanted the newspaper and I didn't think excessive advertising was necessary (neither in terms of environmental responsibility nor in deference to the news that seemed to get lost in the package).
“Well, most of the people I know who receive our paper enjoy the ads,” she insisted. “In fact, they spend more time reading the flyers than they do the news.”
I asked her to repeat what she'd said. I'd heard it right. And I knew I wasn't going to win her support for reducing the amount of newsprint consumed each week by all those flyers. I knew I couldn't explain to her that most people I know read the Cosmos for the news and information it contains about Uxbridge and that the advertisements contained in each edition (for the most part) didn't overpower the editorial content of the newspaper. We were, after all, in the news business.
As time's gone on, these bags of ads have grown. Last week's delivery, for example, contained no fewer than 18 separate flyers and weighed several pounds. Oh yes, and there was a newspaper buried in there. Now, I would be among the first to defend the role that advertising plays in the survival of any newspaper - particularly in the current economy and with the intensity of competition that newspapers face from the Internet these days.
But do I really need to know the price of steak in a store I'd have to travel an hour to make the purchase from? Or, do I really have to have a corporation that doesn't have offices nearby offer me 30 per cent off an investment product I'll never use? And why does a newspaper have to come enclosed in a sales catalogue? That strikes me as excessive.
I recognize that we're not the paperless society that computers were supposed to foster. And we're perhaps even less conscious of the damage that printing newspapers and flyers every day has generated in additional waste in landfill and clear-cut forests. But do we really need a newspaper already full of advertisements to be encased in 18 separate advertising circulars on the chance we might be motivated to buy?
I don't ever want to be responsible for the death of the last pulp and paper-bearing tree or of a newspaper industry that couldn't see the forest for the trees.
