Daily Archives:April 7th, 2010

The Times, they are a-fellin’

There’s a widely quoted trivia fact on the web: that the publication of a typical Sunday edition of the New York Times takes 63,000 trees.

Wow. That’s pretty striking number, if it’s right. But does anyone have a source for it?

There are about 1.5M subscribers to the Sunday edition, so I’m guessing they sell about 2M copies in all. That means a single tree gives you only about 32 copies. Does that sound right? The paper is pretty bulky on a Sunday, but still… I don’t think the economics would work out if that were the case. How much does a tree cost?

Of course, they may be very small trees…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser