“We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years" explained John Yemma, the Christian Science Monitor's editor yesterday while announcing that the paper would end its daily print edition in April 2009. 

At this week's PRSA International conference, the paper was described to me as 'one of the world's best newspapers that nobody reads'.  This could be because of the unique way that it is structured - as the NY Times explains in an excellent article:

"an anomaly in journalism, a nonprofit financed by a church and delivered through the mail. But with seven Pulitzer Prizes and a reputation for thoughtful writing and strong international coverage, it long maintained an outsize influence in the publishing world."

This is the first of the media's big brands to move towards this strategy, and it should be applauded.  With the advent of the internet, blogging platforms and social media, audiences are fragmenting into smaller and smaller special interest groups, creating and consuming only the content that they want.  They want this information in real time. 

This of course is a great advantage of the online strategy.  No more do audiences waking up on the east coast of America turn to printed newspapers only to find that the match report that they wanted to read from LA missed the print deadline.  It's now there in all its glory in the online edition, report, photos, and in all likelihood some video highlights too.  And if it's not in their version of the paper, you can rest assured that one of their friends on Twitter will have told them the score and linked to the best resources for all of the details before the cornflakes are even out of the cupboard.

If your media monitoring and media analysis / evaluation is not currently covering the new electronic and social media, this is the wake up call that it's time for you to reconsider.  The media world is changing, and it's vital that we all change with it.

Finally, if you're keen to know more about Twitter please feel free to connect with me - you'll find me on the site with the username @richardbagnall. I'll look forward to meeting you there.