Christian Science Monitor's new model for digital survival

Tuesday the Christian Science Monitor offered other nonprofit, church-sponsored newspapers one business and publication path from death on paper to digital survival.

The Monitor announced that in April, 2009, it will save millions in printing/circulation costs by becoming the first national newspaper to discard daily print publication in favor of continuously updated online publication.

Currently, the Monitor prints a 20-page, tabloid-size paper five days per week. After elimination of that print product, the Monitor plans to supplement daily Web news with a weekly, 44-page magazine/newspaper "hybrid" will be published each Sunday, but delivered on Fridays or Saturdays. The "hybrid" product is designed to appeal to print advertisers who wish to reach the Monitor audience and generate some circulation revenue. But it isn't seen as a growth product.

Founded 100 years ago by the Christian Science Church in answer to the yellow journalism of its era, the Monitor has a paid circulation of about 56,000 and, like state Baptist newspapers like the North Carolina Biblical Recorder and the Texas Baptist Standard and most other denomination-sponsored religious publications, is distributed by mail.

The Monitor plans to pass like the Jesuitical camel through the needle's eye from dependence upon the disappearing print market to survival in the purely digital realm.

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Read the rest of this blog at CastinglLight's CSM Path to digital survival.

Robosmear Dangers

Twelve years ago in a kinder, gentler era of presidential politics, the late J. Marse Grant argued with some eloquence that "America be spared the mean-spirited name calling between now and Nov. 5."

Grant, who died Friday at the age of 88, was editor emeritus of The Biblical Recorder, North Carolina's state Baptist newspaper. He seemed to be addressing himself primarily to other Southern Baptists, whose leadership he felt had lost its way by making the Southern Baptist Convention a political adjunct to the Republican Party.

Today the general issue of dangerously divisive overstatement is an inescapable national concern -- one well-addressed by Grant's comments.

Grant quoted the Rev. O.S. Hawkins, then pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, as a clear example of what should not be said, and how it should not be said.

Grant wrote:

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