BOSTON – The Christian Science Monitor has decided to stop printing a daily edition and instead focus its efforts on the Internet.
Editor John Yemma told Bloomberg News that the paper probably will cut its editorial staff of 95 by 10 to 15 percent as it tries to stem the tide of losses the Church of Christ, Scientist, has been subsidizing over the years. (The Monitor is expected to lose $18.9 million in the fiscal year ending April 30, on a budget of $34 million.)
“Like much of the news industry, the Monitor has embraced online reporting and is now one of the first publications to treat its Web site as its primary publishing format,” he said in a statement. The publication “recognizes that daily print has become too costly and energy-intensive,” he added.
Yemma conceded that the shift to a “Web-first” format – starting in April – is likely to lead to more short-term losses as the company gives up the $240-per-year print subscription revenue. But eventually, “we hope to make it up. The next century’s model has to be one where print is not at the center of it.”
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Managing Publisher Jonathan Wells said the shift would allow the publication to better serve its global audience. “We have a base of print readers that we can continue to serve by providing longer-format journalism on a weekly basis,” Wells said in a statement. “Ad revenues from our Web site and circulation revenue from our print and e-news editions will form the basis of our business model as the Monitor enters its second century.”
The Monitor has won seven Pulitzer Prizes in its history and has writers in 11 countries, including China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom. Readers of the newspaper will be offered a weekly print subscription and a daily e-mail edition, the Monitor said today on its Web site.
Online ads provide no more than 10 percent of sales at most newspapers, said John Morton, president of the consulting firm Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Md. “There may come a time when you can envision it happening, but not soon,” Morton said.
The Monitor’s circulation stood at 55,192 in the six months ended Sept. 30, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That is down from a 1970 peak of about 230,000, Yemma said.
The newspaper’s Web site attracts 1.5 million users each month, Yemma said. Monitor executives believe the publication can boost its online audience if it devotes the staff to the site instead of print, he added.
It will take several years for profitable Web newspapers to emerge, said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at consulting firm Outsell Inc. in Burlingame, Calif., and a former executive with Knight Ridder Inc.
“It’s the way the world will be in 2015,” Doctor said. But in the meantime, he said, even online publication Politico.com, which has become one of the leading sources of campaign news this year, gets much of its revenue from a print edition distributed around Washington, D.C.
Additional information is available from
The Christian Science Monitor at www.CSMonitor.com.
