What was your challenge?

The challenge was to execute a transition from a five-day a week newspaper to a Web first, multi-platform news organization with an energized website and a print weekly. We also needed to reduce our subsidy from the Christian Science Church and put the Monitor on sustainable economic footing.

What were your results?

In April of 2009, we shut off the daily newspaper and went to a weekly newspaper. We put the bulk of our assets towards the Web. Our staff went through rigorous search engine optimization training, focused on a shorter and faster writing style for the Web and we implemented technological changes through out our website and organization. By freeing human resources from our daily newspaper, our staff has been able to view the Web as something other than an after thought. They are living Web first. They're watching trends on the Web. They understand search in a different way. You can't do that if your primary product is print.

The Christian Science Monitor was the first national newspaper to go to Web first. In the past year, we've been able to move our Web traffic from about seven million Web page views a month in March of 2009 to 14.5 million to March of 2010. We've doubled our unique visitors to five million a month from less than two million a month.

We were able to convert 93 percent of our daily print subscribers to our weekly edition and almost doubled our print circulation in the first year. We've picked up new readers who may have been simpatico with us but never subscribed before. We now have a base of 80,000 subscribers from a base of 43,000 when we started.

We have a plan to decrease our annual subsidy from the Christian Science Church by 60 percent over the next three years. We will accomplish this by reducing costs and developing new revenue streams through the Web and driving our traffic higher. Our goal is to make Monitor journalism self-sustaining.

How did Sulzberger impact your results?

We're very metrics oriented. We try to do things not on hunch but because we can measure it. And we try and stay focused on outcomes and not on processes. You can imagine that in a 100-year-old organization, especially a non-profit, there was a lot of process. But our direction is clear and the goal is clear through the Sulzberger coaching. We have Web traffic goals that we break that by down by month and department. Everyone owns those metrics.

The coaching of my advisor, Steve Dichter, was invaluable. It was a remarkable thing to have that kind of backfield. I've worked with him on everything from personnel issues to revenue potential and cost structure. Every week or so I talked to Steve and then the following year our publisher, Jonathan Wells, took the program and Steve continued to coach our organization through Jonathan's participation. Now our managing editor and director of marketing are enrolled in the program. We share a common language and a common coach. Steve pushes us to be specific, to keep our thinking focused. He makes sure we always confront the hard issues.

Early on, he advised us to clue as many members of the staff as possible into our financial strategy so that they would see what our specific goals were. This forced hard conversations about whether these goals were feasible, but in the end everybody knew what we had to do. With clear targets, senior editors could implement new procedures and staffers knew that this wasn't just a boss's whim. This is how we moved from an average daily story length of 800-1,000 words to under 500 and thereby increased the number of posts we have each day, which has contributed to our traffic increase. Steve also urged us to develop teams to tackle development issues. Doing this the right way – as we learned in the Sulzberger program – has required being very specific about our goals. If there is anything that Steve, Doug, and Charlie have drilled into us it is that: specific, outcome-oriented goals.

In addition to those on our own staff being involved, a lot of learning through the Sulzberger Program happens through the association with other fellows. I'm still in contact with the other fellows in my class because all of our projects are moving forward.