This New England

And so the final daily issue of the 100-year-old Christian Science Monitor comes out Friday, and the operation moves mostly to the Web, though with a weekly print edition to be launched next month. Needless to say, given The Monitor's prestige (especially in international coverage) its success or failure in this re-invention is important.

The Monitor itself noted that the newspaper's shift was "being watched by other news organizations, many of which are weighing changes of their own."

Though based in Boston, the paper has never really been a Boston paper like The Globe or Herald, but rather a sort of exotic creature, though some of its editors have been well known in the Greater Boston speaking circuit.

Few hard-drinking newsmen at The Monitor! It is, after all, part of the Christian Science Church, created by New Englander Mary Baker Eddy. When I was a Boston newsman, we only saw The Monitor's people at events like Harvard colloquia.

XXX

RIP, James Paul Brown Jr., a superb New England newspaperman, who died March 18 at 89.

He worked in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine as an editor and writer, and also at The New York Times as an editorial writer for 10 years. He was an expert on international affairs, economics, boats (well, the wooden ones), the New England coast and quite a few other things, too.

He is notable in my shop for having left The Providence Journal editorial board after a long disagreement with then-Publisher John Watkins over Mr. Brown's frequently written opposition to the Vietnam War.

 Tags  Christian Science Monitor James P. Brown Jr.

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