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A big change to our website

The new navigation on CSMonitor.com will allow readers to sort stories by values, topics, and regions, as seen in this screenshot.

When is a change to the Monitor’s website worth telling our readers about? When that change speaks to how we’re thinking about doing all our work. 

As some of you will know, last summer we changed the way we do some of our stories. Or, more accurately, we sharpened them. The Monitor has always been about exploring deeper themes and ideas. Our plan was to make that plainer. For many of our stories, we started identifying the deeper value that was driving the news, whether it was hope, justice, generosity, or resilience. 

On our website, you’ve been able to go to our News & Values page for months now. There, you can find all the values we chart and all the stories we’ve done about them. But that was just a first step. Our News & Values hub was not always easy to find.

Why We Wrote This

The Monitor has always been about exploring deeper themes and ideas. At the top of every webpage, you will find the traditional sections where news is sorted by topic and region, but also now by values.

As of March 22, we have added a new way to navigate around the site. Wherever you are on csmonitor.com, you’ll be a click or two away from wherever you want to be. At the top of every webpage, you will find the traditional sections where news is sorted by topic and region, but also now by values. 

Why is this important? 

The big challenge for any online news site is to get people to stick around. The tendency is to window-shop the internet, flitting from site to site without staying to explore. The goal of our new navigation is to be one-stop shopping for a different way of looking at the news.

We know people are exhausted by the news – by the constant drumbeat of pessimism, fear, anger, and disrespect. The answer to that is not in simply talking about policies and news events more kindly. Or in just looking for the good news. It is in loving one another despite our differences. And the shortest line to that, the Monitor believes, is in exploring how news is shaped by the values we all share. 

The answer is not to go left or right – or to find some point in the center. It is to go upward – to lift our thoughts to the things that matter most, and then to use that as a lens for understanding others and the world. This is what the values lens does. It seeks the place where news can unite rather than divide, where news can be constructive rather than demoralizing.

There’s more work for us to do, both in our journalism and in our products, to make this sharper and clearer. But making our site navigation easier is a big step. We hope you’ll take a moment to explore.  

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What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
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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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