Christian Science Monitor daily print

» see csmonitor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the christian science monitor was the first newspaper to put its text on the web. that was 1996. i learned that fact later, as a piece of internet history from the year i was still on a 33.6k modem dialing into a turkish isp. the paper itself i knew as a name in bibliographies before i ever read a piece of one.

the daily print edition of the monitor ended on 27 march 2009. that was 100 years and four months after the first edition, which had been dated 25 november 1908 in boston. the publisher, the christian science publishing society, announced the shift in october 2008. the reason cited was straightforward and public. annual operating losses had reached about $18.9 million against $12.5 million in revenue. the monitor could not carry that gap. what it could do was pivot the daily out of print and lean harder on the csmonitor.com side that had been running since '96.

the monitor was never a large-circulation paper by us metro standards. its peak was around 223,000 in 1970 and it had declined to just under 56,000 by the time the daily print ended. what it had instead of size was a national scope backed by the church-institution funding structure. the paper won seven pulitzer prizes over its century. that funding structure is also what let it be first on the web while the new york times was still figuring out what a website was for.

~ the dossier ~

~ the paper before the pivot ~

mary baker eddy founded the paper in 1908, near the end of her life, in the same boston blocks that held the christian science church's mother building. the editorial mandate she wrote in the founding letter has been quoted in every history of the paper since. it framed the monitor as a paper without the crime-and-scandal tilt of the yellow-press competitors of the era. that framing held. the monitor kept a global correspondents' network longer than most american papers of its size could justify.

~ what the daily print left behind ~

the 27 march 2009 issue was the last daily paper. from the following monday the monitor ran only online seven days a week, with a weekly print magazine mailed to subscribers on top of that. the csmonitor.com site had been live since 1996 and had already been through several redesigns. the transition was easier than it would have been for any other daily of similar age, precisely because the paper had never been afraid of putting real reporting on the web. the daily print century closed as a slow deliberate pivot instead of a shutdown. the monitor still publishes in 2026, weekly in print and daily on the web.

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