Monitoring the News: The Brilliant Launch and Sudden Collapse of the Monitor Channel

Between 1988 and 1992 a technologically sophisticated entrepreneurial leadership at the Christian Science Monitor led a costly campaign to diversify beyond the failing newspaper into radio, the Internet, multimedia publishing, and the highest ticket item of all -- a CNN-style, 24-hour news and public affairs cable TV channel. In 1992, the entire enterprise came crashing down. Sue Bridge tells the whole story here, setting it in the historical context of Monitor journalism, beginning with the paper's founding in 1908, through the rise of television in the fifties and sixties, and ending with the effective loss of the Monitor as a significant voice in American journalism, at a time when thoughtful and balanced sources of information are increasingly lost in the mass communications marketplace