Deep Currents

On the theme of the disappearing newspaper, the venerable Christian Science Monitor has become the first major news source to entirely drop its print edition. Print still brings in 92% of newspaper profits, but the Monitor is in the unique situation of being a nonprofit financed by a church, and so may have greater leeway with its need for income. (This on the same day as Google won the right to scan books for online searching and run a fee-based digital library.) This move follows on the heels of several smaller newspapers realizing that conversion to digital was the only route forward, but it remains to be seen what will happen to the organizations that make up the rest of the Fourth Estate. Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the industry visioning project Newspaper Next — or even get radical and adopt the citizen-authored model of Korea’s OhMyNews.

Written: October 29th, 2008