The Christian Science Monitor has announced that they are going web-only for daily news and will print a Sunday magazine: The Monitor Ends Daily Print Edition.

If you read the story, you’ll note they did this in order to cut costs while still retaining their foreign bureaus and reporters. This makes all sorts of sense to me. When I hear about newspapers slashing their reporting staff, I always shake my head. The asset that they leverage for revenue is news reporting. They need to find new ways to leverage that asset effectively rather than cutting it to the bone to preserve an old, declining, business model.

Peter Drucker wrote that the most innovative companies are those who are ruthless about killing off programs, products and services that are no longer producitve. Kudos to the CSM for going boldly to the forefront of their industry.

If you’ve never read it, CSM provides some of the best international coverage out there. I discovered it in college while pulling long graveyard shifts at the periodicals desk as a student employee of the library.