Is it a watershed and harbinger of things to come or is it an outlier? The venerable Christian Science Monitor (published for 100 years) is ending its daily print publication and will publish instead online. It will still publish a weekly print edition. According to AP:
The newspaper 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.
Over the next five years, the church wants to move to a break-even point where it does not have to subsidize the newspaper anymore, said [Editor John] Yemma. To do that, the newspaper needs to focus on the Web, Yemma said.
Here’s additional coverage from the New York Times.
October 28, 2008 at 10:35 pm |
While I don’t read this paper, they will certainly feel the loss of the tangible distribution.
It is unfortunate that the model became unsustainable. My guess is that several years ago they scaled back their salesforce and stopped investing in selling ads.
They will save money by not printing, but they will not replace it with web publishing.
I believe many more undersupported dailies will suffer a similar fate.
October 28, 2008 at 10:58 pm |
Yes, they will be saving costs but as you say they will also be losing revenues.
October 30, 2008 at 7:22 pm |
I think its sad.
November 5, 2008 at 5:40 pm |
[...] Scaling Back: US News Goes Monthly The Christian Science Monitor ended its daily print edition. Now the struggling news magazine US News & World Report, which had pulled back from weekly to [...]
December 16, 2008 at 3:39 pm |
One of the partners chosen by the Monitor to help implement this on-line edition has this post on its company blog today regarding the project
http://blog.duoconsulting.com/