The Christian Science Monitor will be the first major US newspaper to abandon print and focus on publishing online, it announced yesterday.

The Pulitzer-winning paper has faced significant financial losses and a sharp drop in circulation. From next April, it will print only a weekend edition, editor John Yemma said. Circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to 52,000, while online traffic has grown to 5m page-views per month, against 4m five years ago and 1m a decade ago. The paper was one of the first to go online, in 1995, when a correspondent was taken prisoner in Bosnia.

Yemma, the Boston Globe's multimedia editor before joining the Monitor in June, said: "Obviously, this is going to help with our costs, but it also enables us to put much more emphasis on the web and basically put our reporting assets and our editorial assets where we think growth will be in a very tough industry in the future."

The paper was begun in 1908 by Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science church, in reaction to the "yellow journalism" of the time; it is not considered a religious publication. It has 95 fulltime journalists, plus freelancers, and nine US and nine overseas bureaus; this year operating costs were $25.7m, of which the church paid $13.3m.

"There's no magic bullet on the web. There's only doing what essentially works ... doing high-quality journalism and doing it continuously, so that your site becomes a destination, a place where people can expect newly updated news the way you do it," said Yemma.

The target was to raise monthly page views to 25m by 2013. The weekly would be in a 44-page news-magazine format; "web-first" would mean job cuts, but Yemma was unclear how many.