Hail Mary Pass for Newspapers
We’ve been expecting this so long it seems anticlimactic, even overdue.
The Christian Science Monitor announced today it will end its daily print edition and publish only on the Web, except for a new weekend print magazine. The 100-year-old newspaper claimed in a press release it will be the first national daily to substitute its Web site for its print edition when the change kicks in next April.
That may seem true now, but six months is a long time for an industry where circulation and revenue are in freefall. It would be surprising if more newspapers didn’t go Web-only by April.
CSM Magazine prototype
It’s a tough switcheroo to pull, as the Monitor’s finances demonstrate. Most of its revenue comes from the paper’s $219 annual subscription fee. It hopes to make up some of that lost money by recruiting subscribers to a new $89-a-year print magazine and –this is the big surprise — by recruiting Web readers to pay an undetermined subscription fee to receive a new digital version of the daily Monitor.
That is a gambit worth watching, for sure. But there is so much news available on the Web for free –at least for now –that almost any attempt to charge for a Web-based general news service seems doomed.
The Monitor is a different beast than many American newspapers. It’s nonprofit, for one, and draws a subsidy from the Christian Science Church, for another. It also doesn’t rely nearly as much on advertising as most papers do. But it has been caught in the same relentless squeeze of circulation declines and competition from the Internet.
The plight for the rest of the industry doesn’t look much brighter. Some 92 percent of newspaper revenue comes from print operations, while online news still contributes only a paltry percentage.
So for most papers, the sad reality is that stopping the presses likely would amount to little more than a Hail Mary Pass.