Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Media

The Monitor reboots in a competitive new era

By Dan Kennedy

Christian Science Monitor editor David Cook has an odd notion of who he's competing against. At a press event this week to unveil a marketing campaign tied to a subtle redesign of the venerable daily, Cook likened the mainstream press to the National Enquirer -- and added that the difference between the Monitor and other papers is like the difference between Washington Week in Review and Jerry Springer.

It's a given, of course, that the 90-year-old Monitor -- winner of six Pulitzer Prizes, the most recent in 1996 for its coverage of Bosnia -- is not the Enquirer. The real question is why someone looking for a serious, analytical approach to national and international news would choose the Monitor over, say, the national edition of the New York Times. Cook's answer is thoughtful, but somewhat short of convincing.

"The difference between the Times and the Monitor is values," he says -- a reference to, among other things, the absence of cigars and dress stains in the Monitor's coverage of the Clinton scandals. Other advantages the Monitor has over the Times, adds Cook, are "concision rather than exhaustive coverage" (brevity being not just a virtue but a necessity, given that the paper is costing the church millions of dollars a year) and a "more middle-of-the-road editorial page."

The Monitor is a fine paper, and the mainstream media could stand a little of its well-intentioned earnestness. But there's a reason its circulation has fallen from a peak of more than 200,000 in the 1970s to about 72,000 today -- and it's not that there are more boneheaded readers than ever before.

When Mary Baker Eddy founded the Monitor, in 1908, it succeeded by providing an alternative to the yellow press of the day. Even in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, the Monitor filled a void: it was the only quality national daily available. Now the highbrow Times and Wall Street Journal and the middlebrow USA Today are ubiquitous, and other excellent papers, such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, are just a mouse click away. (So, for that matter, is the Monitor, at http://www.csmonitor.com.)

In recent years, the Christian Science Church has had a difficult time living up to Eddy's media mandate, mainly because of a stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality. It blew $300 million on the Monitor Channel, which it tried to position as a serious alternative to traditional television news, because it failed to realize that CNN had already filled that role. Even more quixotic was Monitor Radio, up against the gold standards of broadcast journalism: NPR in the US and the BBC in the rest of the world.

But the Monitor newspaper remains the cornerstone. Its demise would not just end a journalistic era but deprive the church of its most visible symbol. Certainly the church seems determined to keep it going. It's spending heavily on the current promotional effort, and it's sinking $27 million into refurbishing the Monitor's ornate headquarters, next to the Mother Church and down the street from Symphony Hall.

"We're convinced that decency does not have to be dull," says Cook. Maybe not. But, unlike the National Enquirer, it does, apparently, have to be subsidized.