I wonder whether the big cheeses in BDFM management — which shut The Weekender newspaper down last week — are ignorant of a major trend in the US this year that has seen countless newspapers from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat to the Kansas City Kansan and the Tucson Citizen go online only because they could not sustain themselves financially as print publications.

Whether it’s an innovative idea or a last resort remains to be seen but recently the highly respected US-based Christian Science Monitor reported that in the seven months since it scaled back from a daily newspaper to a weekly magazine and beefed up its internet offering that its website’s page views were up by 20% and unique users had risen by a higher percentage. As for its weekly print magazine, 93% of the 43 000 subscribers switched to the new format and sales had increased to 67 000.

The other interesting case study is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which was one of two daily newspapers in Seattle until it went online only in March after it posted a loss of $14m in 2008. It cut back staff and now relies quite a bit on about 200 unpaid bloggers for content. Its owners, Hearst, will not say whether the site – which has morphed into a sort of a home page for Seattle – is making money but that it has kept most of the traffic it had as a newspaper website and that revenue is ahead of projections.

Is this the way of the future? To be liberated from the increasingly high costs of the printing and distribution of newspapers is mighty tempting but there have also been spectacular failures, most notably the Finnish daily newspaper, Taloussanomat, which went online only at the end of 2007 because of falling readership and heavy losses.  After an initial rise in traffic, Taloussanomat’s unique users were 22% lower and pages impressions were 11% down after five months… TO READ THE FULL PIECE GO TO MY MONDAY MONEYWEB COLUMN HERE.

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