Monthly newspaper covers the world environment p.

By: George Garneau

WITH ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS often on front pages and environmental reporting a specialty beat in its own right, is there a market for an environmental newspaper?
The Earth Times thinks so.
The not-for-profit paper sprouted last year, in time for the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, with seed money from the New York Times Foundation.
Though it publishes monthly, it also offers dozens of special editions a year, including daily coverage of international environmental gatherings, so that by mid-July, it had produced 26 papers this year.
Earth Times prints about 25,000 copies a month, most of them mailed free to important policy-makers or distributed through the United Nations. About 2,000 are sold. The cover price is $2.50, but subscriptions go for $36 a year for individuals, $50 for institutions.
Headquartered in the Daily News Building in New York and published by the Earth Pledge Foundation, Earth Times has a full-time staff of four, including one writer. Most of its labor comes from volunteers, part-timers, temporaries and free-lancers, many of them former New York Times hands.
Other contributors have names such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Jimmy Carter is working on a piece.
Theodore Kheel, a longtime New York newspaper labor negotiator and Earth Pledge founder, is publisher and occasional columnist. Writers include Scientific American chairman emeritus Gerard Piel, former Times columnist Richard F. Shepard and retired Timesman C. Gerald Fraser. The paper is designed by Louis Silverstein, former Times assistant managing editor and graphics guru.
Its $900,000 annual expenses are subsidized by foundation grants and the good will of business contributors. The Daily News donates office space. New York Times Regional Newspapers gives environmental stories. Apple Computers tossed in a publishing system. The MacArthur Foundation contributed $100,000.
But Earth Times hopes to become self-supporting by 1995, said Pranay Gupte, 45, a former Times foreign correspondent who is paid part-time as executive editor.
The paper gets some revenue from syndicating stories through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, and Gupte aims to increase paid circulation and to gain more advertising, mostly corporate messages with environmental themes.
Already this year, the U.S. forest products manufacturer Georgia Pacific has signed up for seven pages. Ads sell for an open rate of $5,000 a page.
Subtitled "News and opinion about sustainable development," Earth Times aims to monitor how governments, international agencies and businesses keep their promises on the environment and to foster the goal of sustained development, Gupte said.
He said the paper is neither ideological nor a moral watchdog. It avoids "propaganda" and aims to cover in a non-partisan way environmental topics that mainstream papers often miss.
"We are not a green organization waving the flag and saying green is good," he said.