If
The Christian Science Monitor is indeed a sneak preview of newspapers switching over to online-only daily publication, how will that affect the work of its newsroom and others that may follow? I reached CSM editor John Yemma this morning by phone for some second-day thoughts on the big switchover,
announced Tuesday and coming in April 2009.
The biggest change, he said, will be liberation from the "artificial deadlines" the daily print product imposes. Those are especially onerous at the Monitor, which closes at noon to give the paper a fighting chance to make it through the mail to subscribers the next day.
So instead of being "dated by the time it's read," which Yemma thinks even the biggest and best print dailies are, the new online Monitor will have content "go up any moment" it is finished. That shapes up, he said, as "a pretty grand experiment" in upgrading the current tidy little site which is "well done but minimally updated" and carries a light supplement of multimedia extras.
The human dimension of the change is that nearly all the effort that now goes into producing the print daily can be reapplied to the Web. Yemma expects a lot of learn-as-you-go but has plans for a much broader "portal to Monitor-like content" and addition of social networking, mapping and other applications.
The Monitor will keep a foot in the print business with a 44-page magazine-like weekend supplement. Yemma said that the working projection (optimistic in my view) is that 80 to 85 percent of the 50,000 current print subscribers will convert at $89 a year and that the weekly version will pick up some more people, too busy to want the Monitor every day.
Part of the thinking, Yemma said, is that "paper feels like a luxury item now ... and you don't eat a luxury meal every day." At the same time, "there is some mindshare left on the weekend" for extra reading that appeals to the publication's small but dedicated "fan base."
The Monitor researched and planned the changes over a two-year period. Yemma, who had been deputy managing editor for interactive at The Boston Globe, came aboard relatively late in the game this June. The paper has so little advertising, that unlike the typical metro, it doesn't stand to lose significant print ad revenue.
But the change was undertaken with full knowledge that it would be terribly disappointing to some loyal print-only readers, especially older ones. As a concession, the Monitor will produce a brief daily PDF version, printable and also available on paper at Christian Science reading rooms.
I have observed (as did
a column by the Globe's Alex Beam) that most newspapers are clearly headed to a print edition that is smaller, more narrowly focused on high-end news and analysis and pitched to more educated, well-to-do readers. That pretty much describes the son-to-be-defunct daily print version of the
Monitor.
Yemma agreed that many papers will be downsizing or eliminating the "weak sisters" like Monday, Tuesday and Saturday editions and aiming at a higher-level demographic. There has been an ongoing shift the last several years of advertising and longer stories to the Sunday editions (which can account for as much 50 percent or more of total advertising revenue).
Follow that parallel (my thought not Yemma's) and you can envision the current shrinking newspapers like the skinny print Monitor as a transitional step to a pattern of online mostly publishing as a future path for the industry, with only Sunday editions a print product.
The Monitor's Web site will remain free. "There is no active discussion of a pay wall," Yemma said, or of adding bonus paid content packages as The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times do. Times Select (the abandoned New York Times experiment of charging for certain content), he added "shows that is not the way to go."
