Tuesday the Christian Science Monitor offered other nonprofit, church-sponsored newspapers one business and publication path from death on paper to digital survival on the Web.

The Monitor announced that in April, 2009, it will save millions in printing/circulation costs by becoming the first national newspaper to discard daily print publication in favor of continuously updated online publication.

Currently, the Monitor prints a 20-page, tabloid-size paper five days per week. After elimination of that print product, the Monitor plans to supplement daily Web news with a weekly, 44-page magazine/newspaper "hybrid" will be published each Sunday, but delivered on Fridays or Saturdays. The "hybrid" product is designed to appeal to print advertisers who wish to reach the Monitor audience and generate some circulation revenue. But it isn't seen as a growth product.

Founded 100 years ago by the Christian Science Church in answer to the yellow journalism of its era, the Monitor has a paid circulation of about 56,000 and, like state Baptist newspapers like the North Carolina Biblical Recorder and the Texas Baptist Standard and most other denomination-sponsored religious publications, is distributed by mail.

The Monitor plans to pass like the Jesuitical camel through the needle's eye from dependence upon the disappearing print market to survival in the purely digital realm.

Editor John Yemma estimates the first year will save about $4 million in costs, but likely lose $5 million in revenue, along the a five-year path to break-even.

Break-even apparently requires growth in both Web site traffic and advertising.

That is feasible financially in part because of the structure of Monitor advertising revenue.

Unlike most newspapers, Monitor advertising revenue is not overwhelmingly dependent upon the print product.

Print advertising makes up less than $1 million, whereas Web revenue is about $1.3 million, Yemma said.

Most newspapers lack that balance and as a result have no apparent, graceful path from print dependency to digital survival. According to the Newspaper Association of America, print editions still bring in 92 percent of the overall revenue for most newspapers.

Getting rid of printing plants, delivery trucks, associated staff and the other costs of print publication would still leave most newspapers in an unsustainable position if they dropped their disappearing print editions tomorrow.

Most nonprofit publications like the state Baptist publications are also dependent upon print products, and are likewise doomed, in some cases because they simply ignored warnings of the necessity of repositioning themselves.

Any among these heavily subsidized publications which do survive will also thread the financial and readership needle from print dependency to digital success.

Not only because they too face shifts in advertising away from their print publications, but also because as reader interest in them continues its decades-long decline, they will be abandoned for utilitarian reasons by their sustaining nonprofit organizations.

Unfortunately, most of those publications are as print-on-paper preoccupied as the least adaptable of the curmudgeon-filled mainstream newspaper newsrooms.

Unless we count the Christian Science Monitor's plan, there may be among them no workable model for success.