Oct 28, 2008, 20:14 GMT
San Francisco - The Christian Science Monitor is to stop printing paper editions and become the first major US paper to go completely online, editor John Yemma said Tuesday.
In a statement, Yemma said the move would cut costs at the highly-respected, 100-year-old Monitor which has seen print circulation dwindle to 52,000 from a high of 200,000 in 1970.
The paper is currently published Monday through Friday, and will move to online only in April 2009, at the same time as it introduces a Sunday print magazine. Yemma said the move will allow the paper to keep its eight foreign bureaus open while still lowering costs.
'We have the luxury - the opportunity - of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years,' Yemma said.
Most US newspapers are run as for-profit businesses, but the Christian Science Monitor is a non-profit that is supported by the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston through contributions and an endowment.
Yemma said that the paper took the decision after two years of research and believed that the shift to web only will allow the paper to break even within five years. Last year it lost almost 19 million dollars.
The Monitor's website currently attracts three million page views a month, and Yemma hopes to increase that to 20 million to 30 million a month in the next five years.
The announcement came just a day after an industry study found that newspaper circulation dropped 4.6 per cent last year, continuing a steep multi-year drop caused by the rise of the internet. Many papers have responded with deep cuts, but have been battered anew by the sputtering economy which has prompted a severe decline in advertising revenues.
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