The NYT has a very interesting article about the move in the newspaper industry towards tabloid format from a broadsheet format. This makes me somewhat sad since if the NYT ever did this I would no longer be able to show off the folding techniques that I learned when I was younger. Truth is I read the paper online now with the exception of the Sunday paper which I could never read and fold as one unit.
It's amazing that the form of what we think of when we think of a newspaper dates as the article points out from the 1700's when English publishers were trying to avoid paying taxes on the number of pages they published.
It's also very interesting to me that as print papers begin to look at a tabloid form, websites in general take on a broadsheet form. Take a look at the NY Post's homepage for the contrast. In print a tabloid with a big headline and a picture, and online a menu of options, story leads, and indexes.
The article doesn't mention the Internet at all with the exception of quoting Jeff Jarvis who (of course) was a consultant on the Jersey Journal project they article is about. Isn't circulation down because of the Internet and other news outlets? It seems to me that online sites are sort of hybrids and I wonder how long it is until we name them? News sites seem to be broadsheets with tabloid elements.
- Tabloids are supposed to have shorter punchier writing - the Internet has shorter writing - though the option to go long is always there.
- Tabloids are supposed to be more visually exciting and easier to read - the Internet can be visually exciting and is pretty easy to read, and it can be read in different formats.
- Papers worry that advertisers won't pay the rates they did for broadsheets since their pages are half the size. Publishers argue that they have the same impact so advertisers should pay the same rates. Online advertising is measured to death with very little regard to it's "impact".
No conclusions here just pointing out some things that occured to me as I read the article. Lastly the format of web sites as we know them is changing too but just as English publishers created the broadsheet in reaction to taxes we have created a whole universe based on technology for example, a horizontal rectangle as opposed to a vertical one.