Yet another shoe fell in the newspaper industry today as The Christian Science Monitor announced plans to switch from a daily to weekly format in April of 2009. More tellingly, the paper will focus most of its energy on growing its website, CSMontior.com, according to Mediapost.com.

The Monitor is coming late to a party already in full swing at papers such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, at television news networks, and on sites sprung from the loins of e-businesses such as AOL. And like so many of the traditional lions of print journalism, the CSM is sitting on a stable of experienced and polished writers, too many for one weekly magazine, so layoffs are expected. By focusing on the web with 24/7 coverage updates, it obviously hopes to keep the best of its staff working. However, few except the WSJ have been able to make a subscription-based service work, and advertising alone probably won't cover the wages of those top-notch reporters.

The Monitor has been bleeding money, with $18.9 million in losses last year, according to Business Week. Circulation, which peaked at 223,000 in 1970, is down to 56,000. Even worse, less than 10% of its print revenues comes from advertising.

Because the newspaper is owned by the Christian Science Church, it may not have always danced to Mammon's tune like Rupert Murdoch, but even it cannot long ignore the lack of readers. Given its narrow market, lack of media partners, and late entry to the game, to succeed the Monitor will need some help from above.

And I mean even further above than Rupert Murdoch.

Rolling Stone magazine recently published a fortieth anniversary issue celebrating the magazine's tenure in the popular culture business. After reading the issue and wading through the multitude of advertisements, I started thinking about Rolling Stone as the precursor to so many of the music magazines in existence today and how these kinds of media serve the record industry in an increasingly digital world. Forty years ago, Rolling Stone may have been an inventive method to sell music, with interviews and features about artists, but as it is now the magazine and its followers are hardly what they claim to be: music magazines.

The very notion of a "music magazine" is quickly becoming outdated, as is found simply by perusing through the articles and features through most of the print I purchase regularly. Compare it to other, older magazines, like the British NME and you will find that the Rolling Stone falls down in coverage simply because there is an overabundance of non-music advertisements. Even other contemporary magazines, like Blender, manage to advertise the actual music, while both sell the digital devices that are quickly becoming the mediums of music transferal.

If championing the music is the goal, which presumably it is, Rolling Stone has never seemed far from what we call "mainstream," so it hardly has the capacity to introduce new bands and compete with the growth of online services like Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG)'s YouTube or News Corporation (NYSE: NWS)'s MySpace. Even other magazines quickly champion lesser known bands into mass-popularity. Consider NME, the magazine was a massive supporter of the Arctic Monkeys and they quickly became more popular than they had been, even with the online support. With the weekly issue NME prints, the publisher keeps a more up-to-date and consistent online news service, signaling that the move online is not contained to artists.