Somewhat related to my post about the LA Times death watch, the Christian Science Monitor has announced it will no longer publish a daily print paper in 2009. You can still get it weekly, but the plan is to move operations more heavily to the web. It’s apparently the first US national daily to drop daily print for online. I like this from the AP:
The Monitor’s circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now, while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
But lest the web seem a savior, there’s also this:
Citi Investment Research analyst Catriona Fallon wrote Monday that she expects newspapers’ revenue from classified, national and retail advertising to continue falling through 2009. And, in the context of initiating coverage of three major newspaper publishers — Gannett Co., The New York Times Co. and The McClatchy Co. — she said online revenue is years away from offsetting declines in print.
