CS Monitor replaces daily print edition with its website

Analysis: Is it a model that other struggling newspapers should follow? Why could the Christian Science Monitor succeed on the net if it did not in print?

Big news in the United States: the 100 year-old news organization announced that in 2009 the Monitor will become the first US nation-wide circulated newspaper to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.

The changes at the Monitor will include:

• closing the current daily print edition (circa 20-page publication distributed mainly by US mail);
• launching a weekly print product (44-page publication that “read like a news magazine”);
• starting a daily e-mail edition (multipage PDF file sent by e-mail to subscribers Monday through Friday);
• enhancing the content of its website with multimedia and 24/7 updates.

The new weekly print edition will launch in April and be priced at $3.50 per copy or $89 for a year’s subscription (a full price subscription for the current daily print edition is $219).

The main rational behind the change is just a cost cutting. As Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said: “Ceasing print publication carries significant savings, as the expense associated with putting out a daily paper accounts for some 40 percent of a newspaper’s costs.” The Monitor executives expect also to make an undetermined number of cuts.

More about the Christian Science Monitor

The Monitor was started in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science Church. However, it was not established to be a religious-themed paper, nor does it promote the doctrine of its patron church. With the exception of one religious feature a day it covers current events around the world.

The Monitor is praised for its outstanding long-feature and analysis journalism: it won seven Pulitzer prizes.

The Monitor’s circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.

Unusually in the US, the paper’s circulation revenues of around $11 million outstrip its ad revenue which is under $1 million. Additionally, syndicated sales of the Monitor’s articles bring in another nearly $1 million a year.

The paper has been operating at a loss for years, and has received a subsidy from the church to fund the deficit. In the current fiscal year, the newspaper’s operating costs were about $25.7 million, but the church paid about $13.3 million of that.

The paper’s staff is 130, of which 100 work for the editorial.

More: slideshow of the updated CSMonitor.com, slideshow of a new weekly print edition prototype, video discussion on the changes between the Monitor editor John Yemma and its managing publisher Jonathan Wells.

Is it a model that other struggling newspapers should follow?

The concept of a daily online site associated with a weekly product has been around for some time.

Recently, Juan Antonio Giner of Innovation Media Consulting spoke about it at the INMA Outlook 2009: European conference in Vienna in October.

He pointed at the Economist (UK-based magazine and online service) as the prime example of such a strategy.

The main difference is that the Economist had been already successful in print before it has embraced the web.

The main question to the Christian Science Monitor’s editor and publisher is: if they cannot find enough readers to support the paper in one channel, why should they succeed in another one? Just because of the lower cost base and the Long Tail?

I am afraid the internet is more competitive for news media and not less than the print industry. There are no barriers of entry and there is a huge problem to make any money on it.

Why US online readers should prefer the Monitor instead of other English-language sources of quality international journalism like — for example — the UK-based state broadcaster BBC or UK papers like the Guardian, or the Times?

According to comScore data quoted by the Business Week, BBC has 6.6 million unique US visitors per month, the Guardian attracts 2.5 million and the Monitor reaches just 700,000.

The Monitor enters the weekly news magazine market at a time when the main US news-weeklies like Time and Newsweek also struggle.

Of course, there are some newcomers who prosper — the invaders from the UK like the Economist and the Week. Both these magazines are very different from established US-based competitors: in concept and the content.

So my point is: maybe it is not primarily about a channel? Maybe it is about what you deliver instead of how you do it?

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