By Pierre Terrien, Publisher
When Michel Veilleux and I split up L’Escale Maritime Magazine more than 26 years ago to create L’Escale Nautique to cover pleasure boating in Quebec and Maritime Magazine to cover the maritime industry in Canada, we were far from being able to anticipate what the digital revolution would have in store for print media.
I would like to take advantage of the publication of the 100th edition of Maritime Magazine to take stock of our reality. Like many other companies, we are recovering from a difficult period due to the pandemic, but we are confident, as the content of our century-old baby clearly illustrates, that there is still a future in the specialized press niche .
On the other hand, we are beginning to sense a definite reluctance on the part of some advertisers to appear in a print medium. We are disappointed by this reaction, as the environmental record of the print industry has improved admirably over the last few decades, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Only in terms of paper supply, it is not new trees that feed the paper mills, but fibre from our selective waste collections, which have also been set up at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and which enjoy great support from the population.
It’s a far cry to suggest that computer networks can boast of such an enviable ecological footprint. On the contrary, the internet and all its cloud-based derivatives are under severe attack.
The digital sector requires a lot of energy to function, and is a major consumer of non-renewable natural resources. If the internet were a country, it would be the 3rd largest consumer of electricity in the world after China and the US [1]. Moreover, 7 to 10% of the world’s electricity is arguably consumed by the Internet alone.
It is therefore without remorse that we continue to offer the paper version of Maritime Magazine to which you can subscribe by following THIS LINK. Let’s not forget, information has a price!
On the other hand, it is impossible for us to ignore this brave New World, if we are to ensure our continued existence.
You can therefore follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and better yet, read the 100th edition of Maritime Magazine online.
Also, subscribe to our free daily maritime newsletter by visiting maritimemag.com
MANY THANKS AND HAPPY READING!
[1] https://www.ictworks.org/digital-technologies-climate-change-problem/
