The Christian Science Monitor is a Boston-based online news organization and former newspaper, the first national American newspaper to replace its daily print edition with a web operation.

The Monitor is a nonprofit organization owned by the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Though the Monitor has been subsidized by the Christian Science church for most of its history (about $7.5 million annually in total subsidy as of 2014) and publishes a daily religious article, it is not a religious publication.

The Monitor was founded in 1908 as an alternative to the yellow journalism of that era. It specializes in in-depth foreign reporting and analytical journalism. The Monitor has won seven Pulitzer Prizes. It also was one of the first American newspapers to put content online, in 1995, and one of the first to use RSS, in 2002.

With steadily falling circulation and projected annual losses of $18.9 million, the Monitor announced in late 2008 it would shift its print edition from a daily to a weekly and operate as a web-based organization. The change was made largely for financial reasons, as the paper’s relatively small circulation and wide distribution area made a daily print edition particularly expensive to produce and deliver. With the move online, the Monitor is working to gradually lessen its reliance on the church’s subsidy.