The Christian Science Monitor

The New York Times' Stehanie Clifford and PoynterOnline's Rick Edmonds are reporting that The Christian Science Monitor will be abandoning its print component starting April 1st, 2009 to focus all of its resources to the nonprofit paper's Web site.

Ms. Clifford quotes CSM editor John Yemma as saying, "We have the luxury — the opportunity — of making a leap that most newspapers will have to make in the next five years." The paper will also be creating a Sunday magazine.

Also weighing in is Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp, who estimates that CSM stands to save $4 million a year by going paperless. Mr. Strupp does however quote Mr. Yemma saying, "we are probably going to have to do some modest downsizing, some modest cost-cutting."

The abduction of Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January, along with the murder of her interpreter, Alan Enwiya, was an important event. Her ordeal demonstrated that the Islamic world has friends in the West—people like Jill Carroll, people who went out to try and understand who they are, in the wake of 9/11. Appeals from around the Arab world surely played a role in her being freed by jihadists. And during her captivity, 82 days, a lot of us who thought about her felt we knew her: a serious and generous person who knew how to enjoy herself.

Alas, it appears that Carroll has now gone along with the Christian Science Monitor's addlepated plan to turn her abduction into a circulation bonanza. It is running her story over several days. The result is so far a disaster. The first entry is all action, and lots of it. Nothing but action. Not a serious thought to be had. And the story is co-bylined. A guy named Peter Grier gets equal credit. I thought Jill Carroll was a writer. Dammit, she is a writer.

This is shocking. The one thing an intelligent reader always wanted after Carroll's joyful release was Jill Carroll's thoughts, Jill Carroll's experience, Jill Carroll's honest reflections. Unfiltered. Undramatized. Find a rock and crawl under it, Monitor, and let Jill Carroll speak for herself.

I was checking out the Christian Science Monitor's remarkable series of intimate photographs of Jill Carroll's reunion with her parents, hugging her father, falling over in her mother's lap, when I felt the tears falling on my keyboard. http://www.csmonitor.com/slideshows/2006/homecoming2/index.html

Why so stirring? Well, you wouldn't know it from the mainstream media, but Jill Carroll has become a kind of symbol over the last few weeks of a different American response to the world. Carroll went to the Mid East in 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to try and understand that part of the world. She worked for the Jordan Times (which called her "Our Jill" after she was kidnaped), and she started learning Arabic.

To Jill Carroll, these people weren't Other. It's interesting to consider that if neoconservatism and the idea of a clash of civilizations have the greatest hold on the minds of graying men, young women are most immune to that kind of talk. Jill Carroll's not alone. Marla Ruzicka, the human rights worker killed by an IED in Iraq; Rachel Corrie, the protester killed by Israelis in Gaza in 2003; and my wife's cousin Betsy O'Neil, who teaches in Damascus—right there you have four young American women called to that part of the world in a spirit of outreach. They are trying to heal the western-Arab divide.

Jill Carroll's work had that character: she was trying to soften the talk about a clash of civilizations by making that world more understandable to us. (Yes, I do think there's a clash of civilizations, but that topic can wait). And this is what so many Iraqis and Muslims said when she was kidnaped, in appealing for her release. Or said in thousands of emails to the Monitor. Her release is thus a vindication of that principle, that different cultures can come to an understanding. And therefore joyful to so many of us, when every other answer people come up with in Iraq is brutalized.

It seems to me a sign of the spiritual evolution of the Carroll family, and the Monitor, that they made as much of Jill Carroll's reunion public as they did in the remarkable series of photos. The family (and paper) were indicating through this open act that the gift of Carroll's return was one to be shared with everyone who is looking for a better solution to the clash of civilizations than occupation and indiscriminate violence.

Amid all the joy over Jill Carroll's release, it's pretty inspiring that her father immediately called attention to the other kidnap victims still unaccounted for and that the Christian Science Monitor has set up a fund for the family of Carroll's murdered translator, Alan Enwiya. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0331/p10s04-woiq.html