'Christian Science Monitor' Ditches Print, Mostly

Yesterday's news about the steepening slide in newspaper circulation pointed to a coming era in which print may no longer be a viable format for daily journalism. So why not sidestep the upheaval of the next decade or so and skip ahead to the future we all know is coming?

That's the thinking at the Christian Science Monitor, which today is announcing a radical change of format. Beginning next April, the century-old Boston-based daily will terminate its current print edition in favor of several new components: a 24-hour breaking-news website, a printed weekend edition with more in-depth stories and analysis, and a daily e-mail product that will be available on a subscription basis.

"All of the macro trends show that web readership is where, certainly, younger generations are going now, and they don't even have to be that much younger," says editor John Yemma, explaining the paper's thinking. "So if that's what the trend was, why are we still shackling ourselves to this daily print product? It was the biggest cost that we could move away from, the biggest impediment to relevance and the thing that was diverting our attention from the web site, where the only reasonable expectation of growth was."

While that logic has relevance for any newspaper, certain aspects of the CSM's situation make an early move to a Web-led mode of existence more sensible than it might be for others. For one thing, while most papers are still profitable, or at least were until very recently, the Monitor has been losing money, staying afloat with the help of what Yemma calls "a very generous subsidy" from the Church of Christ, Scientist. With the new format in place, the Monitor projects going from a current operating deficit of $13 million a year to a deficit of $3 million a year.

The paper is also more constrained than most by the exigencies of print production. A national paper with a relatively tiny circulation of 52,214, it relies on a complex system of outsourced printing and distribution. The result is an editorial close that's sometimes as early as noon.

"We're up against impossible deadlines, so it actually affects the kind of relevance questions that journalists always care about," says Yemma.

For that reason, the journalists at the CSM should embrace the change -- if they're still around afterwards. Yemma says there will be a "modest reduction" in the paper's editorial staff of 95 associated with the format switch. "I'm going to guess it's in the 10-plus percent range but nothing draconian," he says.