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Testing, testing: A new CSMonitor.com is on the way. Here's what you'll see.

We're testing new approaches to our website aimed at making CSMonitor.com more accessible and deepening your engagement with the award-winning journalism of The Christian Science Monitor. 

To our readers:

If you come across a different looking page on our website, it's one of the options we are testing as we redesign CSMonitor.com. 

We'll be unveiling the new look and feel next year. Our goal is to deepen your engagement with The Christian Science Monitor's award-winning journalism, to invite you to read related articles that give you a deeper understanding of the news, and to encourage you to return to our site when you are seeking a calm, thoughtful, solution-oriented approach to what's happening in the world. The Monitor has been publishing those sorts of articles for 105 years. 

To set the stage for our redesign, we started with what we knew about our audience. The live tests we're running will help us create a site designed for you.  With that reader focus in mind, we have developed paths to deeper understanding. You can select a newsletter, for instance, that focuses on an area of interest, or you can click on a health-care reform 101 or get a briefing on nuclear proliferation. We're also developing an option to help you go beyond reading, to take action -- to contribute to disaster relief, to let your elected representative know your opinion on a big issue, to support an activity that seeks to improve your community or the world. The take-action feature is a work in progress. And the Monitor cares about human progress. We even have a regular feature called "Progress Watch." 

You're the judge, of course, but we think our new design will offer you a clean, straight-forward article flow, bolder navigation, and a more contemporary overall approach. We are minimizing interruptions within an article to make the reading experience smoother. And we've updated the navigation to better highlight trending and seasonal topics.

What do you think? What other features might be helpful. Please let us know. Email: http://tinyurl.com/mqjhort

John Yemma

Editor

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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