Another one bites the dust in the world dead-tree newspaper publication.
The Christian Science Monitor — 100 years worth of high-quality print publishing deemed worthy of seven Pulitzer prizes — announced today that it will be ditching the daily paper in favor of an online-only weekday operation and a new Sunday magazine.
As might be expected, the Monitor did its best to polish the news:
The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.
The changes at the Monitor will include enhancing the content on CSMonitor.com, starting weekly print and daily e-mail editions, and discontinuing the current daily print format.
This new, multiplatform strategy for the Monitor will “secure and enlarge the Monitor’s role in its second century,” said Mary Trammell, editor in chief of The Christian Science Publishing Society and a member of the Christian Science Board of Directors. Mrs. Trammell said that “journalism that seeks to bless humanity, not injure, and that shines light on the world’s challenges in an effort to seek solutions, is at the center of Mary Baker Eddy’s vision for the Monitor. The method of delivery and format are secondary” and need to be adjusted, given Mrs. Eddy’s call to keep the Monitor “abreast of the times.”
Having seen circulation slide from a high of 220,000 in 1970 to today’s 52,000, the Monitor’s decision mark’s the first such online-only move by a national newspaper.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, that world-renowned expert in the economics of the publishing industry, recently predicted that all print will be dead within 10 years. I disagreed with him then … and still do.
But there’s no mistaking the trend.
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