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“ If Obama were standing up there next to his teen

daughter and her thug-life baby daddy, you better
believe ‘nominee’ wouldn’t be the first N-word that
came to people’s minds.”
LARRY WILMORE
THE DAILY SHOW’S “SENIOR BLACK” CORRESPONDENT,
SPEAKING AT MTV NETWORKS’S “THE ELECTION EFFECT” PANEL DISCUSSION

OBITUARIES Issue Close: frees up resources for

Stopping
The Monitor’s international news-
stereotype room gathering.”
circa 1925; its first

t
The Web-first model

the Press
edition; the modern
incarnation. implies challenges that
marketers
m and adver-
tisers are well-awarewar of: reader reten-
tion, uniqueue visitors, page views.
HIS IS NOT ANOTHER NEWSPAPER OBIT- “Look,
oo I don’t want to be
uary. But, more than a hundred years Pollyannaish
oll about this,”
since its first edition, The Yemma
m says. Change is
Christian Science wrenching,
enc but I’m very
Monitor will literally optimistic.
mis We’re a bit small-
stop its daily presses er, nimble,
mb so we’ll be able to
this coming April. make this
his a smooth transition.
The Monitor, long rec- I think pepeople can look to us
ognized for its reliable for lessons
ns as they move in this
journalism, will adopt a direction, too.”
oo.
“Web-first strategy, supplemented by The csmonitor.com
mo features
a large-format weekly print product,” include audio clips with each article,
o cl
says John Yemma, editor-in-chief. and innovativee ccomponents such as
Calling The Monitor a pioneer, Yemma the award-winning ing “Little Bill Clinton,”
expects the transition to stimulate aggres- a multimedia blog og covering the life of
sive growth in online readership and doesn’t a Congolese immigrantmi attending an
anticipate major layoffs. Newsrooms have Atlanta charter school.
cho Yemma believes
shed about 10 percent of their workforce in they’ve gone online.” engaging content like this
meaningful, engagin
the past decade, according a report ort by the Yemma sees the Internet not will open up new rev revenue streams.
m Among
Project for Excellence in Journalism. s
merely as a disruptive competitor to seri- The Monitor is also launching a sub-
others, The New York Times, USA Today and ous news — the death knell to journalism scription-based weekend edition, a large-
COURTESY OF THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

The San Francisco Chronicle trimmed down
in ’08. The Monitor saw circulation drop
nearly 20 percent.
The paper takes a big, necessary risk
here. “It’s not enough to be morose and
nostalgic about the great days of newspa-
pers in the ’80s, when money was flowing
like a river,” says Yemma. “That business
model is gone. Craigslist, cars.com, mon-
and democracy as we know it — but as
an opportunity. “We’re taking a respected
100-year-old brand with a commitment to
international news, finance and human
values, and modernizing it. We’ve all got
to create a sustainable financial model.
So we keep the newsroom as watchdogs,
our reporters on the street, and our inter-
national bureaus. The Internet gives us
format (similar to Rolling Stone) hybrid
between a weekly newsmagazine and a
newspaper. “Falling or not, Sunday news-
papers are still the big moneymakers. This
will be an alternative to the Economist, Time
and Newsweek.
“It’s an oversimplification to say we’re
stopping the daily,” Yemma says. “The
fact is, we’re going more daily than ever.”
:

ster.com killed it. Readers have voted, and a relatively low cost infrastructure, so that #J Mitchell McMahon
PHOTOS

22 <4380 November 2008