Monitoring the future of newspapers
A professor of mine used to say - a tad cryptically, I thought - that "history doesn't happen at the same time in the same place." Similarly, the Armani-clad "futurists" who haunt the corridors of Fortune 500 companies are fond of quoting William Gibson's apothegm that "The future is here. It is just not evenly distributed."
One place where the future remains unevenly distributed is the newspaper business. The country's most successful dailies are enduring draconian cutbacks in personnel and coverage. Some of the also-rans are disappearing altogether. What no one knows is: What will the newspaper of the future look like? Maybe it will look like The Christian Science Monitor.
Here is my thinking. Today's metropolitan dailies are watching their core revenue streams of circulation and advertising bleed away in a seemingly endless, reverse Chinese water torture. That happened to the Monitor decades ago. When I came to Boston in 1984, the Monitor sold about 160,000 copies. Now it sells just 55,000 copies, many of them delivered by mail.
Ads inside the print Monitor or on the website www.csmonitor.com are few and far between. The total advertising revenue is not much more than a million dollars. "We had to face up to a lot of these economic pressures well before other newspapers," admits Monitor managing publisher Jonathan Wells.
So what does it do?
First off, the Monitor picks its spots, quite cannily. The paper continues to invest in foreign coverage. At a time when most media outlets are closing overseas bureaus, the Monitor still maintains eight foreign correspondents and a healthy network of contributors, or stringers. The paper did a fine job covering the brief war in Georgia, for instance. "That's a natural Monitor story," says editor John Yemma, who was until recently a deputy managing editor at the Globe. "We have reporters in place, and we can help the reader understand what it's all about."
The Monitor maintains a well-staffed office in Washington, D.C., as well as five national bureaus. It is selective in what it covers. The problem with events like the Olympics or the idiotic national political conventions is information overload. These mega-events spew out tons of reporting, almost all of it chaff. So who are you going to trust to explain the world to you, in just 20 pages each day?
You could trust the Monitor and its 110 staffers, and comparatively tiny, $28 million annual news budget. (More than half of its costs are covered by an endowment, or directly subsidized by the Christian Science church.) Its specialty is timely, analytical journalism, unleavened by the cynicism of the ink-stained wretch. The Monitor aims "to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." "Monitor news is different," Yemma explains. "It's humane, and it's committed. We are a newspaper of hope."
What's in those 20, small-format pages? Book reviews, recipes, and a decent op-ed section. I read a sophisticated piece on the failure of George Bush's "relationship strategy," his notion that his great pals Vladimir Putin and Pervez Musharraf would help him sort out the world's problems. Expect to see a lot of front-page coverage of the Third World - e.g., "Strategic shift in North Africa militancy" - and plain old-fashioned scoops. Monitor reporter Alexandra Marks broke the story that Cindy McCain gilded the lily when she claimed, falsely, that Mother Teresa convinced her to adopt two orphans on a trip to Bangladesh. That was a huge hit on the Internet.
Ah, the Internet. Publisher Wells puts the Web at the top of his priority list, with the print paper number three after building electronic subscriptions. Yemma says the website now attracts slightly less than a million unique visitors a month, as measured by Nielsen//NetRatings. (The Globe gets about 5 million, the New York Times 19 million.) It's not a website you would turn to for immediate news. Hurricanes, plane crashes, the he-said-she-said of electoral politics just doesn't register on csmonitor.com.
The Monitor, alone among American newspapers, has seen the future before. In the mid-1980s, the church invested tens of millions of dollars in pre-Internet "new media," creating a cable television news broadcast, an expensive and sophisticated radio operation, and eventually opening its own television station. The whole enterprise went bust, but "the troubles," as they are now called, instilled a much-needed sense of caution at Monitor headquarters on One Norway St.
I'm not sure how the future will be distributed, but this time I think the Monitor will have a piece of it.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 