The Problem with Tabloids in the US Is That They Have a Bad Name.
So Let’s Forget About Switching to “Tabloid” and Instead Make the Change to “Compact.” But Make the Change!

Philip M. Stone May 2, 2005

Although readers around the world have voted with their subscriptions that they prefer tabloid size, in the US that’s a tough sell. For in the US when one talks of tabloid it is not the size of the paper that is being talked about, but rather tabloid is synonymous with “gutter press”. And although there are some very fine tabloid-size newspapers in the US, the label is hard to kill.

For a marketing person faced with that kind of problem the solution is really quite simple – don’t call them tabloids. Take a leaf from what the Times of London and The Independent did when they made their transformations last year – they did NOT become tabloids – for in the UK tabloids have their own particular reputation -- but instead they became “compacts”.

When one thinks of tabloids in the US it is usually the supermarket weeklies full of all the gossip and dirt they can find on personalities. And journalistic ethics are somewhat lacking.

No better example than this week when the Star tabloid carried a fake front cover on the hottest entertainment gossip story going – the alleged romance of Brad Pitt and Angelina Joli.  The Star’s competitor, Us Weekly, allegedly paid about $500,000 for a series of photos of the twosome on an African beach. So, not to be outdone and to have a spoiler, the Star took two separate pictures -- Pitt on the beach in Anguilla in January, and Joli with her son, taken in Virginia last year. And with electronic editing, presto -- they are shown beside one another walking on a beach.

But even the tabloids seem to have improved their ethics. In the old days they would have printed such a cover without divulging what they had done. But now, in small type on page 46, they admit it is a cut and paste job!

And that, unfortunately, is the reputation the “tabloids” have in the US, perhaps more so with newspaper editors than with the mainstream readership, but it is a major reason why US editors have a hard time considering a change in paper size.

Mario Garcia, probably the world’s leading expert in changing broadsheets to tabloids, made that very point in a White Paper he issued last week, that tabloid should not be considered a dirty word. He asks, “What constitutes serious journalism today? For many editors, it begins with a newspaper in the broadsheet format. For readers, fortunately, it is decided by content and presentation, not on the size of the sheet on which it is printed.”

How many readers remember when Rupert Murdoch first made his imprint in the US? In 1973 he bought the tabloid San Antonio Express and he ensured it had all the crime and entertainment dirt it could print. He kept to that formula a year later when he launched the Star, and during the years he added the Boston Herald-American (renamed Herald), the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times.

For all of that ownership, however, Murdoch had no respect. Mention his name in a room of editors and publishers and they would damn him -- he was a tabloid publisher -- a pariah within the industry. Well, lots of things can change in 32 years. The tabloids except for New York are gone from his stable, and now Murdoch owns the Fox film studios, the Fox Network, and other media entities around the world. It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say he is perhaps the most respected media mogul in the US today.

Murdoch, who owns the Times of London and gave the final approval for its switch to “compact”, recently told a meeting of US editors they had to change their ways, especially to compete with the Internet that was stealing its readers, particularly the young. To paraphrase an old advertisement for a Wall Street firm, “When Rupert Murdoch Speaks, people listen.”

“What constitutes serious journalism today? For readers...it is... content and presentation, not...size of the sheet....”
Tabloid Consultant Mario Garcia

Making the switch from broadsheet to tabloid is not as simple as changing the size of the paper.  It requires a change in the journalistic state of mind.  It means, as Garcia says, producing “content that is more appealing and more personal, redefining the old definition of news. It includes more people coverage and trends starting on page one, regardless of page size.”

In Europe, where tabloidization has become the norm and the broadsheet the exception, overcoming that state of mind issue has been paramount. Sometimes it has meant that editors and journalists brought up in the “old school” have found the transition too difficult, and that sometimes has led to staff changes.

 It is hard, for instance, for a journalist used to writing 1,000 word stories to see just the first five paragraphs now used, but shorter stories are mandatory – it is what the reader wants. And can a make-up editor really switch from designing a front-page of eight columns of type with a couple of pictures to a page one with just one large picture – basically a poster for what’s inside?

But those problems have been overcome successfully. Just how prevalent is the switchover in Europe? Forty years ago in Norway, for instance, there were 136 broadsheet newspapers and 16 tabloids, according to Eric Wilberg of Wilberg Management in Oslo.  Today there are 146 tabloids and five broadsheets.

The fact is that wherever in Europe the broadsheet/tabloid switch has been made, it has stopped circulation decline, it has made the reader far happier, and it has retrieved some of the young who were relying just on the Internet for their news. 

Come to think of it, aren’t those exactly the same problems the US newspaper industry is striving to resolve. Americans usually are at the forefront of change, but in this case they have taken a backseat to the rest of the world.

The competition – especially the Internet – is successfully continuing to produce new marketing ploys to get more and more visitors to their pages. US newspapers, on the other hand, see their number of readers continue to decline.

 It’s time for major surgery before the patient dies.