Harvesting produce early buys you time to slowly ripen it, rather than rushing to use all the fruits and veggies at once. Secondly, newspaper is effective at trapping the gases that produce such as tomatoes, apples, bananas, peaches, and pears emit. When certain fruits and veggies are carefully stored in newspaper, those gases can't escape, and instead go to work ripening produce. It's important to limit the newspaper methods to produce that actually continues to ripen after harvesting. These "climacteric" fruits and vegetables, as they're called, include tomatoes, pears, winter squash, apples, apricots, peaches, plums, and honeydew melons.