• by Sara Guaglione , March 8, 2018

The Christian Science Monitor will put up a metered paywall on May 8. Readers will be able to access five articles for free before they are asked to subscribe.

“After years of tumult in the journalism industry, we feel the way forward is increasingly clear: Produce journalism worthy of reader support and ask readers to support it,” Mark Sappenfield, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, wrote in a post on the publication’s site announcing the paywall.

Sappenfield added that digital advertising is “a business that is declining for the Monitor and many other news organizations.” A paywall “puts us on a better path to securing the long-term success of the Monitor by placing it on a firmer economic footing," he wrote.

The paywall follows the successful launch of the Monitor’s digital subscription product The Monitor Daily, which was introduced one year to the day the paywall will go up. The Monitor Daily newsletter contains five simplified, easy-to-consume stories. It now has 9,000 paid subscribers, a 50% open rate and a 20% click-through rate, when readers click to read the full story teased in the Daily.

The paywall is a shift in the Monitor’s focus to the “reader relationship” and the “user experience," associate publisher David Grant told Publishers Daily. “Organizations that build meaningful and direct relationships with readers are the most sustainable,” Grant said.

Digital subscribers will get access to both The Monitor Daily and to the Monitor’s full site. Current subscribers to The Monitor Daily will get unlimited access to the Monitor’s site.

Digital subscribers to the Monitor will now get an ad-free experience of the site. Non-subscribers will still see ads. The Monitor “has always been substantially supported by the subscriptions of our readers,” Grant said. “Advertising … is never going to give us the incentives or sustainability we seek as an organization.”

He added, “Advertising has always been a challenge for the Monitor, but subscriptions have always been our strength. Let’s focus on what we’re good at: building a good relationship with readers.”

The Monitor's shift of focus to its direct relationship with readers means the brand will reconfigure how it produces editorial content, too.

“The editorial team is thinking about how to be distinctive, with new ways in telling stories,” Grant said, such as testing the use of graphics, editorial series, audio and video.

The Christian Science Monitor’s site will also get a redesign when the paywall is erected, to look and feel more like The Monitor Daily.

“The site has to be beautiful, welcoming, less noisy and less cluttered. We want readers to get to our journalism in the clearest, cleanest and most direct manner,” Grant said. The site gets about 2 million unique visitors a month, and Grant believes about 1,000 of those readers will be converted to paid subscribers when they hit the paywall.

“Then we will test offers” and market the subscription to specific readers, he said.

A digital subscription to The Christian Science Monitor costs $110 for an annual subscription, or $11 a month.

Print subscribers who get The Monitor Weeklywill get a 40% discount on a digital subscription, which amounts to about $7 month or $70 a year, in addition to their print subscription.