Print circulation and Web traffic have grown at The Christian Science Monitor since its recent switch to “Web-first, plus print weekly,” but advertising remains sluggish and break-even a distant dream.
Over punch and cookies at the Monitor‘s Quotes Cafe Wednesday, editor John Yemma hosted several dozen visitors from this week’s annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. AEJMC is meeting at the hotel just across from the Christian Science church’s massive reflecting pool and 14-acre headquarters in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.
Yemma told us that paid circulation of the print weekly is running at about 50,000 — up from about 43,000 for the daily paper that was discontinued March 27. He said csmonitor.com is attracting 25 percent higher traffic than it was last year, and he reported about 1,200 subscribers paying $5.75 a month for a three-page Daily News Briefing delivered via PDF by 5 a.m. EST every day. The briefing includes a daily, 180-word column by Yemma.
All this still requires a $10 million annual subsidy from the church, but Yemma told visiting teachers and editors Wednesday that he and his team are “on budget” to whittle away at that cushion. Monitor communications manager Jay Jostyn said the church hopes to cut its annual subsidy to $2 million within the next five years.
Yemma said the paper will require more substantial circulation for the print weekly before it can grow advertising, which remains scarce across the weekly’s 48 pages.
Stepping away from the noon deadlines of a daily paper delivered by mail has “freed up our correspondents to pursue a new form of journalism on the Web that’s more responsive to the news,” Yemma told the AEJMC group.
He cited, as an example, Monitor coverage of the return of the two journalists jailed in N. Korea. Wednesday morning’s Daily Briefing PDF led with staff writer Howard LaFranchi’s story, which included a prominent promo: “For more of today’s stories, go to CSMonitor.com.” Online, LaFranchi posted an analysis about why direct talks between the U.S. and North Korea remain unlikely.
Yemma said the site is attracting 2.5 to 3 million unique visitors each month, with a page view count of about 7.5 million.
Ross Atkins, who edits the Daily News Briefing, took a group of us on a tour of the newsroom after the discussion with Yemma. He attributed many of the empty desks to the time of day (approaching 5:30 p.m.), though staff cuts from just under 100 to about 75 have left many seats unfilled at every hour.
Still, the Monitor continues to staff eight foreign bureaus as well as an eight-member Washington bureau and several national bureaus.
At least one of the AEJMC visitors, former Monitor staffer Bill Babcock, who now teaches journalism at Southern Illinois University, remained a skeptic about the path the church has followed with its news operation.
Shortly after the Monitor abandoned its daily edition March 27, Babcock critiqued the move in an essay headlined “A sad legacy: Directors let daily print Christian Science Monitor fold” published on MinnPost.com.
Babcock said the church could have established an endowment that would have preserved the daily paper with money he said its directors squandered on the elaborate church headquarters and an ill-fated television project in the ’80s. In comments attached to his piece, Monitor staffer Brad Knickerbocker didn’t quarrel with the history Babcock recounted but argued that the daily paper was doomed both by industry trends and the enterprise’s unusual circumstances.
As my colleague Rick Edmonds pointed out in May, the key question is how well the Monitor and others, such as the Detroit papers, are able to migrate readers from print to online.
