One of the best newspapers in the world, the , announced Tuesday it would become the first leading newspaper to drop its daily print edition and, instead, to go 100% online.
CSM decided to go online completely after suffering losses in readership and, thus, advertising revenue.
It struggled financially for decades but, the paper which became 100 years old this year, realized it could not continue on the traveled path any longer. Instead, CSM will publish a print edition every weekend, and publish the rest of its stories online only.
Interesting about the is that while its print edition lost readership (down from 230,000 in 1970 to 50,000 in 2008) its online readership soared: it has approximately 5 million pageviews each month, compared to 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
Although CSM is the first nationally circulated and greatly respected newspaper to publish its content online completely, and to drop the daily print edition, it is not the first time that it has led the way Internet-wise. Back in 1995, CSM was the first newspaper to go online generally, when one of its reporters was kidnapped in Bosnia. Now, in 2008, you can only read the newspaper online and in the weekends in print.
“Obviously, this is going to help with our costs, but it also enables us to put much more emphasis on the Web and basically put our reporting assets and our editorial assets where we think growth will be in a very tough industry in the future, which we think is the Web,” Editor John Yemma said.
Other newspapers and magazines are likely to follow in the coming years. Especially now that economies worldwide are in crisis, newspapers will lose readership with regards to their print editions. Online, however, readership is likely to continue to grow, for increasingly more people have Internet access and use it to be informed on what happens in their country and the rest of the world.
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