It was probably long in coming, but it was sad to see the announcement that The Christian Science Monitor is officially moving to a web-only publication. The print version will disappear in April. My former editor at CSM (who now works for The Washington Post) points out that the Monitor has been more or less web-only for a long time now with 1.5 million online readers versus only 50,000 or so print subscribers.
Paul Theroux was one of my journalism idols when I was in high school and college. Because many of his travel essays first appeared in the Monitor, it made it all the sweeter when I first broke into that publication’s pages.
The Monitor was also one of the first newspaper subscriptions I had in my own name. I had professors who encouraged us to buy the newspaper for its Third World coverage, which in those days was nonpareil. Many of the paper’s foreign correspondents were stringers, but the paper made a concerted effort to cover areas of the world normally passed over by other mainstream U.S. publications.
Eight Diagrams 