…the end of The Christian Science Monitor as a daily newsprint product. The website, and a print weekly, will continue.

The Monitor was seldom, if ever, a moneymaker. It was subsidized by the CS church, which has faced dying-off memberships and financial belt-tightening in recent decades.

Its circulation peaked in the 1970s, before the NY Times was widely available outside the Northeast. To tens of thousands of readers over the years, it was a small but assured voice of reason and solemnity.

As an anomaly of the U.S. newspaper biz, the Monitor‘s very existence attested that serious “boutique” journalism was feasible in this country, so long as it didn’t have to turn a profit. These days, some industry analysts have offered up the idea that local daily papers might turn to nonprofit models as a means to preserving themselves.

In recent years, the printed Monitor hasn’t been widely available at newsstands or vending machines, only at CS Reading Rooms. It was still available by subscription; but if dead-tree journalism was becoming passé in the Internet age, a dead-tree journalism product distributed five days a week via the Postal Service was even more behind the times. Which simply added to its image as a charming oddity.