Newspaper To Stop The Printing Press To Focus on Digital

The Christian Science Monitor, one of the oldest papers, has made the decision to shut down the newspaper presses by next April and focus its coverage with email and web. Circulation of their daily has dropped to 52,000 and deficits are rising. "The Monitor will announce today that come April 2009, it will fold its tab-sized daily and relaunch as a glossy, oversized newsweekly format, while beefing up its Web site with more original reporting and frequent updates. The globally-focused newspaper also plans to create a daily, paid, e-mail edition that will include top Monitor stories, links to other stories and an original editor’s column."
Perhaps the time is ripe to stop all printing and create an e-version copy instead. The advertising dollar is moving online and their readers seem to prefer getting their CS news from the web. Still for a printing company, it is hard to stop printing altogether. At some point, however, Kindle or the Sony Reader or some other digital device is the next step to enjoy a downloaded copy of the news. That is where this trend is heading.

The CS Monitor is not the first to shut down. "Two smaller dailies have made similar moves in the past year. E.W. Scripps kept Kentucky Post alive at KYPost.com after folding the 27,000-circ paper along with sibling paper Cincinnati Post on Dec. 31, 2007. And in April, the 17,000-circ afternoon Capital Times in Madison, Wis., dropped its freestanding daily edition and beefed up its Web site."