Appealing to a higher authority

There is hand-wringing in the executive suites of every newspaper in America. No scheme is deemed too outlandish to win back defecting readers as the bosses reach out to downsizing gurus, snake oil-peddling consultants, and the gadget guy or gal of the moment selling a high-tech, magic bullet fix.

At the Christian Science Monitor, they are praying.

Speaking at an informational session inside the Original Edifice-- Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy's first church in Boston -- newly appointed Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim compared the plight of the venerable daily to a famous character from the Book of Acts. While the apostle Paul is preaching in a home in Troas, in present-day Turkey, a boy named Eutychus tumbles out of a loft. Everyone thinks the boy is dead, but Paul embraces him and says, ''Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him."

Bergenheim, Monitor publisher Jonathan Wells, and three other executives devoted an hour of Monday's Annual Meeting of the Church of Christ, Scientist, to assure the faithful that there is still some life left in the church's flagship paper. For now, the Monitor is on life support. The paper, once one of America's most prestigious dailies, has suffered severe budget cuts and staff layoffs. Daily print circulation, which hit 150,000 in the early 1980s, is down to 59,000 copies. The small-format tabloid, which used to run 28 pages, is now only 20.

Bergenheim & Co. want to make the Monitor look bigger than it really is, mainly by increasing its visibility on TV and radio talk shows, and by drawing traffic to the paper's website, csmonitor.com. The Web works well for the Monitor because it publishes the paper's distinctive brand of nonhysterical journalism -- let's just say the Michael Jackson trial isn't exactly front and center in the Monitor's pages -- in real time.

Distribution of the print newspaper, with its dispersed national readership, has always been a problem for the church. Forty percent of its readers get the paper more than a day late, thanks to the vagaries of US Postal Service delivery.

Online manager Karla Vallance told church members that csmonitor.com receives 1.8 million unique visitors a month, which is pretty good for an outfit its size. By comparison, The New York Times gets about 10 million, and the Globe 3.2 million, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The Monitor website sent out 6.4 million so-called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) files last month, referring to articles that can be automatically downloaded from the website. That's a lot.

I thought I heard Wells and Paul Bermel of the church's Publishing Society drop hints that the paper might move to an all-digital format. Wells spoke of the ''delicate economic basis" of the paper's finances and noted that ''we are becoming less matter-based." Bermel told the church members that ''we can occupy new ground ahead of other people."

In follow-up interviews, neither Wells nor Bergenheim would confirm that the Monitor is considering an all-Web format. ''There is no way to say right now that we would go to an all-digital format in some specific period of time," Wells said. ''We've been experimenting with alternate forms of distribution for decades," added Bergenheim, who on Monday urged church members to subscribe to the paper, to advertise, and ''to continue praying for this vital life force, the Christian Science Monitor."

02138 & friends

02138, the would-be alternative alumni magazine for Harvard graduates that released a dodgy 400-person ''poll" over the weekend purporting to show that Harvard alumni support embattled president Lawrence Summers, has some interesting supporters. For starters, our old boss: Former Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor, a 1969 graduate of the World's Greatest University, is the editorial director.

Perhaps more surprisingly, on the magazine's editorial board we find the name of publisher David Thorne, John F. Kerry's classmate at Yale and like Kerry a member of Skull and Bones, Yale's elite, super-secret secret society. And here's a man with extensive alumni magazine experience: R. Bruce Journey, boss of MIT's money-losing machine, Technology Review. Over a period of years, TR racked up $27 million in losses. During two of those years, Journey's annual compensation hit $1 million.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.