Christian Science Monitor gives up print edition

BOSTON - The Christian Science Monitor said yesterday that it would become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online. The step is a sign of the financial pressure squeezing the newspaper industry as the economy slumps, and readers and advertisers flee to the Internet.

Come April, the Monitor, a Boston-based general-interest newspaper founded in 1908, will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced.

Circulation at the Monitor, which has won seven Pulitzer Prizes in its history, has fallen from a peak of 230,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about five million page-views per month compared with about four million five years ago and one million a decade ago.

The newspaper is known for its in-depth international reporting, particularly in the Middle East.

The Monitor was one of the first newspapers in the country to put content online, beginning in 1995, when correspondent David Rohde, a former reporting intern at The Philadelphia Inquirer, was taken prisoner in Bosnia.

After labor, the most expensive items for a newspaper are printing and delivery.

"Obviously, this is going to help with our costs, but it also enables us to put much more emphasis on the Web and basically put our reporting assets and our editorial assets where we think growth will be in a very tough industry in the future, which we think is the Web," said editor John Yemma.

Cutting print editions also will help the paper reduce its dependence on sizable subsidies from its owner, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which now provides more than half its operating budget, he said.

The move to "Web-first" publishing, Yemma said, will likely result in some job cuts, but it is unclear how many.

Like many other newspapers, it has suffered as more people have gotten their news from the Internet - which offers newspapers much less revenue, even when it brings many more readers.

Andie Tucher, an associate professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, said the Monitor has traditionally been a newspaper people read for in-depth articles after they got news from a local or state newspaper. With even small newspapers being squeezed by the Web, she said, it makes sense that a "second read" like the Monitor would be harder hit.