London Times goes Tabloid! Queen says, "Well, REALLY!"

LONDON (AP) - To make sure nobody missed its big change from a broadsheet to a tabloid, The Times of London told readers about it on the front page. On Saturday, a notice at the top of page 1 said, “The Times—the last broadsheet edition.” In going tabloid, The Times became the second major British paper to move to the smaller, more commuter-friendly format in a bid to reverse slumping sales. For the last few years, sales for Britain’s broadsheet newspapers have been falling. Since November 2003, The Times had been printing both tabloid and broadsheet formats, saying that sales had grown by 4.5 percent to 660,000 copies a day. The decision to go totally tabloid risks alienating some of the 216-year-old newspaper’s more traditionalist readers. But all is not lost for them. The Times’ sister paper, The Sunday Times, will remain a broadsheet.

—I’m gobsmacked! If The New York Times ever goers tabloid, I shall stop reading it, lest people think I am sullying my dainty hands with the NY Post.

Oh, the perfidy!

:: faints dead away ::

I wish all papers would go to tabloid format. It’s a heckuva lot easier to handle than broadsheets, whether you’re commuting or not.

How did “tabloid” come to mean “sleazy purveyor of questionable at best stories about celebrities”? I don’t think most people even know that the word tabloid originally meant simply a different format of printing and – ummm, I forget the word but should know it because I have an MLS — how they fold it up?

Apart from that, I’ve noticed that a number of smallish cities sometimes have tabloid format newspapers that are not sleazy, but the term tabloid is so besmirched that it wouldn’t surprise me if such innocent newspapers could sue for libel if someone used that term to describe them.

The Independent has been publishing in tabloid format since May. The Guardian will be switching to a medium-sized format next year.

These papers tend to use the term “compact” rather than tabloid, to distinguish themselves from the red tops and other rags.

Make that 2006 for The Guardian.

On the day the Independent went tabloid, the Guardian had a two-page spread which contained the entire day’s paper, in a fold-up-and-cut smallest-newspaper-ever version :smiley:

Oh, mercy mercy me
Oh, things ain’t what they used to be
No, no
Where did all the broadsheets go
Tabloid is the wind that blows
From the north, east, south, and sea
Oh, mercy mercy me

– with apologies to Marvin Gaye, except he’s dead.