While it has a circulation of only about 50,000, the century-old Monitor, with a net loss of $18.9 million covered by subsidies from the Mother Church and an endowment fund, was able to maintain 9 foreign bureaus, 9 U.S. bureaus, and 100 news staffers. They can, perhaps, maintain all of that with a subsidy half as large by cutting out the print edition, with the exception of a printed weekly magazine. In their own words, the Monitor will be "the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day."
In my second post on this blog, on September 20, I wrote:
To have even a chance of survival, the mindset of the industry needs to become: We are in the business of publishing information content continuously on our web sites; every 24 hours (for now, and this may ultimately change to once or twice weekly) we gather some of that information into a printed product and distribute it, but our business is focused on and driven by our online operations. Right now, I don't see anyone in the industry articulating this direction unequivocally.Scratch that last sentence. The Christian Science Monitor has seen the light. Congratulations. Who's next?
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