Image John Yemma, editor of The Monitor, said it was making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years. Credit... Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Still, said Ken Doctor, a newspaper analyst at Outsell Inc., most newspapers cannot give up paper. Print editions still bring in 92 percent of the overall revenue, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

“If that much revenue is tied up in the print product, if tomorrow these companies dropped those editions, they would have 90 percent less revenue,” Mr. Doctor said. While getting rid of costs like printing plants and delivery trucks would help a little, he said, it would not make up for the lost revenue.

Mr. Yemma said that print did bring in money at The Monitor, but most of that was from subscriptions, not advertising. Subscriptions account for about $9 million of The Monitor’s revenue, while print advertising makes up less than $1 million. Web revenue is about $1.3 million, he said. He is projecting that circulation revenue will drop, but he expects the magazine format will appeal to print advertisers. He is planning cuts, too. Mr. Yemma said he was planning some layoffs on both the 100-person editorial side and the 30-person business side. “I’m not sure the same number of people will be needed,” he said, but “there’s certainly nothing like a draconian cut coming.”

Under the new system, reporters will be expected to file stories to the Web and update them a few times a day, and write longer pieces for the weekend magazine.

Image The Monitors home page on the Web. The new online focus will allow the paper to keep eight foreign bureaus open.

Mr. Yemma said he hoped to establish CSMonitor.com as an essential place for international news. The site now gets about three million page views a month, according to comScore, and Mr. Yemma said he wanted to increase that to 20 million to 30 million a month in the next five years. Even if he can fill the site only with remnant, cheap ads, he said, if visits grow as he is projecting, “that’s a sustainable model.”