“Right now when readers show up at most news websites, it’s like if you walked into a bar every week or a restaurant every week and you saw the same waiter and they never remembered your name or remembered everything about you,” Grant said. “While the industry has long said that we’re accountable to our readers and we care about them, when those people are really directly responsible for the vast majority of your revenue, you better be committed to serving them.”Īnd on the business side, it needed to get to know its readers better so it could convince them to subscribe: “The thing about dealing with a subscriber base is that they pay you money and you’re accountable to them,” he said. On the news side, the Monitor had to think how its coverage could stand out. Monitor associate publisher David Grant told me the paper had to address issues of “heart” - its editorial coverage - and “mind” - its approach to the business side in order to maximize its chances for success with the new venture. Months of testing and research led to the ultimate decision to move to the digital subscription model, but once that decision was made the Monitor had to work to cultivate a culture and workflow on both the editorial and business sides to support the new model charging for online coverage. The Monitor also produces a daily audio edition as well. How a co-ed hockey team made up of veterans is helping them fight hopelessnessĮach issue also includes an editorial from the Monitor’s editorial board, one religious story, and a photo story.The changing role of Jordanian women in that country’s workforce.English-speakers’ rights in Cameroon and how their treatment reflects the larger trend of minority rights in Africa.President Trump’s approach to trade with China.“If we don’t deliver on that, then we’re not delivering what we need to attract and keep the kind of membership (we need),” managing editor Amelia Newcomb told me.Ī recent issue, for instance, featured stories about:
Instead, the Monitor tries to offer a one-of-a-kind perspective on the world that readers can’t get anywhere else. With only five stories per day, it can’t cover everything. As a result, the Monitor tried to produce lots of online stories that would rise to the top of the search rankings.īut with the move to the Monitor Daily, the outlet recalibrated the types of things it covers online. The Monitor’s previous digital strategy had been built around scale, chasing traffic through Google News and search platforms. (You can catch up on our first four issues here.)
Every Thursday, we take an in-depth look at one neat thing in journalism, share some lessons you can take away, and point you toward other excellent resources. Solution Set is a new weekly report from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Solutions Journalism Network. Even though the Monitor is a global news organization, any news org that’s going to ask its readers to directly support its journalism can learn from the Monitor’s approach. This week in Solution Set we’re going to look at a few of the processes the Monitor changed to make this possible. To try and live up to that promise, the Monitor had to revamp its culture and its workflows to produce high-value coverage and emphasize the need to convert readers to subscribers. The Monitor bills the news digest as a unique look at the news, providing readers coverage of the world that they won’t be able to get elsewhere. It refocused its daily reporting into a subscription-supported daily news digest called The Monitor Daily.
Last year, The Christian Science Monitor totally changed its digital operations.
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