Well, you have the successful stories and the less successful ones. Today the editors’ team of the OverMorgen decided to quit. This was the magazine of the Dutch students NGO for sustainable development. I was involved in this since three years. We wrote about developments regarding sustainability at universities, local grassroots actions, and the environment related to personal lifestyle. Lack of money forced us to stop our activities: you can’t ask subsidy for publishing magazines. We tried to find sustainable businesses and organisations that were willing to advertise, but the results were insufficient. Printing on FSC-paper and with eco-friendly ink is quite expensive you know… So that’s the end of that, and we closed the meeting with drinking some nice organic beers and eating some organic chocolate 
Ah well, digital is more suited to nowadays world anyway. I can still publish on this wonderful web-log and might start writing for other digital channels. By going digital, we reduce our paper consumption so save some trees, but will emit more CO2 for the energy our computers are using. What’s worse? In the end, there isn’t a single option that doesn’t impact the environment…
Seeing old exemplars of the magazine? (Mostly in Dutch)
Computers actually don’t consume that much power. There are some CO2-emissions coming out of transporting wood, paper, ink and magazines also.
I don’t agree with you Johan,
I measured the energy consumption of my own computer, and it’s consuming 110-120 Watts. And the monitor also consumes, I don’t know how much but it shouldn’t be too much since it’s a flatscreen.
But you’re right that printing a magazine also consumes energy. It’s hard to tell what’s worse – that’s the point I want to make: everything we do impacts the environment in different ways, and therefore it’s hard to say what’s better or worse sometimes. I don’t really feel like a life cycle analysis in this case…
Notebook computers are far more energy efficient. Apple’s MacBook Air idles at 13 W. But, of course, you need to transport computers too.