Amy Gahran of Contentious was kind enough to blog my Christian Science Monitor idea yesterday both on her blog and on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. And she went a wonderful step forward and asked Tom Regan, who runs CSM’s blogging, including his excellentMy American Experience blog, what he thought about my declaration of CSM’s blogginess. His answer includes the following:

That “mission” of the Monitor is every bit as important as making money – in fact, I can say after being here 10 years that it’s often more important than making money. It’s the reason I’m still here, since I’m not a Christian Scientist and have no link to the church other than I greatly enjoy working for its publishing arm.

We understand how the Internet helps us accomplish this goal, and that blogs are like a multiplier of the effect. As you said in your Poynter blog item, we also believe it’s going to help the bottom line in the long run as well.

But you should really read Amy’s whole post. Thanks, Amy for taking this idea and running with it. I guess this means I should actually finish the damned research this weekend, huh?

Thanks to everyone who’s linked to, or commented on, my early experiments with a blog link per circulation metric. Now that Quinn has pointed out that LpkC can be pronounced “El Pixie”, invoking images of a suave Latin leprechaun, I like the term much better.

A journalist emailed me earlier today, asking me to speculate on why the Christian Science Monitor has such disproportionate influence in the blogosphere. Here’s what I came up with:

- CSM adopted RSS very early on, and has been a fan of blogs since at least 2001 (Dave Winer observed in June 2001 that CSM was considering introducing a set of topical weblogs. He announced that CSM was “fully supporting” RSS on October 28, 2002, very early in the weblog syndication movement.) Because CSM was early to the game , bloggers have been reading the paper online for a long time and linking to it.

- CSM has astoundingly good international coverage – they maintain bureaus in 11 countries, which radically outpaces most newspapers. In 2002, the Monitor’s editor observed that CSM’s overseas presence was larger than all but 5 other US newspapers, and was more substantial than all three major US television networks. For bloggers like me who concentrate on international affairs, CSM (along with the BBC) are precious and popular resources.

- Becaue CSM invests so heavily in overseas reporters and stringers, they use comparatively little information from AP and Reuters, which large American newspapers rely heavily on for their overseas coverage. While AP and Reuters are likely blogged more often than CSM, they get blogged under the banner of each newspaper running their stories – a Reuters story on the Democratic Republic of Congo will get a few blog mentions under the New York Times, a few under the Globe, etc. But CSM’s content is unique, and uniquely associated with the csmonitor.com site in technorati.

Moving even further into the realm of pure speculation:

CSM stories often lead with a personal story – the experience of an individual person – rather than a statement of facts about an event. (Whether this is part of the CSM stylebook or just my observation of favorite CSM correspondents, I don’t know.) This, to me, seems like a very blogggy characteristic. Bloggers tend to be interested in good stories, not simple dry facts. It’s possible that the CSM’s style of reporting national and international news is unusually well suited for bloggers to pick these stories up.

I’ll add one more piece of idle speculation: one of the conclusions I drew from my experiments with media attention is that the BBC covers the world with a substantially different attention profile than all other media sources I explored. I would speculate that a profile of CSM’s coverage would look more like the BBC’s coverage and less like CNN’s coverage (for instance), with a similar heavy emphasis on the developing world. (Unfortunately, CSM’s search engine prevents me from running my GAP scripts on it and checking this hypothesis.)

CSM and BBC are both unusual in the sense that they are not purely market-driven media entities. BBC is supported by a license fee, CSM is supported by donations, as well as ad and subscription support, and published by the Church of Christ, Scientist. In both cases, the news bureaus – while not free of financial constraints – don’t have the pressure of a for-profit company demanding increased profits either through increased revenues or lowered costs. No, this doesn’t mean that all non-profit newspapers are worth reading or that papers owned by for-profits can’t do exemplary journalism. But it’s worth thinking about and looking into further.

A quick roundup of stories I’ll be watching over the weekend:

Severo Moto, leader-in-exile of Equatorial Guinea’s main opposition party, has disappeared. A central figure in last year’s bizarre coup plot – where Equatorial Guinea alleges that South African mercenaries, financed in part by Sir Mark Thatcher, were headed to Malabo, via Zimbabwe, to overthrow the government and install Moto as leader – Moto has not been seen in ten days, and speculation is growing that he may have been assasinated in Croatia or Italy. In the meantime, Equatorial Guinea has distinguished itself as one of the world’s most repressive countries, according to Freedom House. (Thanks to Ambiguous Adventure for the pointer to the Freedom House report.)

Despite protests and international concern, Togo’s interim president Abbas Bonfoh promised that Togo’s presidential elections would take place as planned, on Sunday. Yesterday, Togo’s Interior Minister Francois Boko held a surprise press conference, urging the government to delay the elections, warning of violence if polls were held this weekend – Bonfoh responded by promptly sacking Boko.

There are good reasons to believe that Sunday’s polls will not be free and fair and that there may well be violence. When Gnassingbe Eyadema died earlier this year, after ruling the nation for almost four decades, the Togolese government defied their constitution and installed Eyadema’s son, Faure, as president until international pressure forced him to step down. Faure Gnassingbé will now run against the opposition’s second-choice candidate, Emmanuel Akitani Bob, as opposition leader Gilchrist Olympio is not being allowed to participate in the elections. (Olympio has been living in Ghana and France since a 1992 assasination attempt forced him into exile. Togo’s election rules were changed in 2003 to require that any presidential candidate live in the country.) RSF is concerned that independent media outlets have been closed down prior to the election, and Head Heeb observes that there’s already been extensive pre-election violence.

Moving from small nations that few people read about to one that people can’t stop reading about: Rogers Cadenhead, blogger and geek, registered benedictxvi.com weeks before John Paul II’s death… along with ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com and PiusXIII.com. Cadenhead was concerned that the domains would be bought up by pornographers, who have previously redirected domains like whitehouse.com to porn sites. Cadenhead is redirecting benedictxvi.com to Modest Needs, a matching service for small-scale charitable giving and reports today that the charity is receiving five times as many donations as on the average day. Dave Winer – Cadenhead’s friend and neighbor – has been urging him to use the domain for an independent journalism weblog focused on the new pope and his policies.

In the meantime, the new Pope has announced his email address – benedettoxvi@vatican.va.

All of which raises the interesting question: will future Popes look for original nom-de-Popes in the hopes of avoiding domain name conflicts?