Newspaper Vs News site: Which is greener?

In the UK alone we buy millions of newspapers every day. Each day the Sun and the Times newspapers are bought by 4.5 million of us, but would reading online newspapers and news websites decrease how much we contribute to Climate Change when reading the news? The Sun's website gets 1.3 million people browsing it per day. If everyone who buys those two newspapers looked on the website for the Sun, surely we would do less harm to the environment, or would we?

We may save a lot of paper but unless we burn all the newspapers, it's not going to do much harm to the environment. The average computer uses up to 500 watts and a CRT or LCD monitor uses a maximum of 150 watts. This will use a lot of fossil fuels but not everyone has access to the internet or even a computer. According to information released in September 2009 by internetsworldstats.com, there are 46,686,900 internet users in the UK. News websites such as BBC News and Sky News get thousands of visits every day.

Producing newspapers isn't all that harmful to the environment, but transporting them is a big problem. According to the Royal Mail, there are at least 12,134 branches of the Post Office in the UK. There are hundreds of post vans delivery news and other private transport firms who collect and deliver to newsagents. How many people then drive to the newsagent to collect their papers is unknown, but at least most local deliveries are by young people on foot or bicycle.

There's no clear winner when deciding which form of news reading is more environmentally friendly, as we don't have all the information to back it up. However, in my opinion, newspapers are more environmentally friendly because of the amount of fossil fuel used in providing the electricity to run a computer. What do you think? Feel free to comment with your views.