Most of it mail, almost no retail and low ad revenue. It makes sense for them.

Huge papers like the NY Times, WSJ etc. are a different animal. Circ of millions or hundreds of thousands per day and enormous ad revenue. Six figure rates for full page ads. Those vehicles exist as a way to sell advertising. Those exhorbitant ad rates will never (for the forseeable future) carry over to the web.

So no "paper" - no money. Journalists love their calling I'm sure, but they love getting paid too. Travel and hotels and investigative reporting and research and top flight photojournalists and cartoonists and so on - all of them expect to be paid - and that pay derives mostly from ad revenue.

That and people still like holding and carrying their newspapers and books around. Not all of us have jobs that llow us to surf the web all day and keep abreast of the latest news and those of us exhausted at the end of a work day and still owing face time to our partners and families and having to contend w/ feeding/washing ourselves may not want to spend valuable downtime surfing the net - especially if there's movies and tv shows to watch.

Until they invent a Minority Report-style changeable, reusable news'paper'. Your 'paper' would have a cell chip in it al la Amazon's Kindle and it would update itself at 4AM, about the time your current paper is delivered. Then you would have the best of both worlds: A paper-style form factor updated electronically.

The real crisis with newspapers isn't, I don't think, things like the Christian Science Monitor. It's things like the small-town papers which still serve as a primary source of local news for many who aren't online-savvy. People can rely on network TV for national news or things impacting their nearest urban center, but good luck if you live in a town of 15,000 people.

At the same time, printing costs are high and advertising revenues are suffering--in my hometown, car dealerships and real estate have always made up a big chunk of the advertising in the local paper and neither areas are doing well. But while a major corporation by this point probably won't blink at advertising online, that's a jump that many local businesses haven't made yet. So, if they stay offline they have to deal with printing costs, but if they go online they may lose some of their few remaining advertisers.

It's a bad situation to be in, and in the end I'm afraid the people who lose will be people like my grandparents, who do still genuinely read their local papers and don't seem likely to be able to make the transition online. The fact that the Christian Science Monitor isn't really a primary news source means that losing the paper copy probably won't really hurt anyone; losing access to the only medium that might describe candidates and issues from your town or county ballot, I think, could.

One of my college jobs was delivering a major paper to about 200 homes. Even at that point it was obvious that most daily papers were a bunch of ads held together by news stories copied from the wires. Now that those wires are available basically for free, papers do have to re-invent themselves.

Many are doing this by cutting writers and scaling back, but the Monitor has long had a deep stable of writers with interesting perspectives. Going electronic with those voices is exactly the kind of things more papers need to do -- mentor and nurture journalists to produce interesting stories about their communities and the people in them, and then present them in a format that doesn't depend on any one physical item.

I started reading the Christian Science Monitor online over a decade ago when I was living overseas, and have always appreciated their independent view of events. I was aware that it is an important paper that predates the web, but it never occurred to me to read it in paper form. I'm sure I have glanced at the front page in the periodical room of a library or when walking past a Christian Science reading room. I just don't recall any specific instance.

While I'm a little hazy on the business model of online newspapers, dropping the paper edition sounds reasonable to me. I hope they stick around for a long time.

I have a laptop, but it's heavy, bulky, and it's plugged into a separate monitor upstairs.

I want to read the paper at the kitchen table, and I still do, every day, with the dead tree edition of my local daily.

I like the idea of the Kindle, but shelling out 300+ dollars for a gadget I can't play with in advance is a bit steep.

Plus, how do I give the comics to my kids while I read the editorials on a Kindle?

Throw my phone at them?

I read papers from all around the world via the miracle of the internet. This is something that means very much to me. I enjoy sticking my nose in everyones business no matter how far away.

But best of all....none of my precious trees were cut down to supply the paper that traditional media required.

CSM started out as a polemic by Christian Scientist's founders to fight against Pulitzer's personal jihad against them. In the last 100 years it's become an entirely legit and respectable non religious newspaper that has won 8 Pulitzer prizes since.

The Monitor doesn't "cover" cancer cures, and discusses diseases only in terms of budgets and, maybe, causes. For cures, the monitor still prefers prayer over chemo.

how much longer can any newspaper executive justify the huge operating expense of printing and distributing the printed page?

As long as the online unit still loses money and the print unit still makes money. Which is still the case for most papers (even the CSM, it seems: they're saving $3M but losing $4M in revenue by shutting down the presses). If they shut the presses they'd immediately go into the red. Most are still making money today -- just less and less each year, and less than the stock market wants them to.

I agree that, long term, print is dead. But all these newspapers have the "legacy" problem. They don't want to move their energies too far online because they're losing money there still. But by the time the lines on the graph cross and they finally give up print, they'll have lost a lot of ground to competitors online. (They already have.) It's the same problem that Microsoft faces in the transition to Web services; they don't want to give up the Windows tax. Technology transitions always seem to work this way. It's journalists' turn now.