Newspapers, on the hunt for readers, think smaller

International Herald Tribune – May 16, 2005

Eric Pfanner

 

 

LONDON In a world where bigger often means better, newspapers instead are taking a page from the electronics industry, pursuing a quest for smallness and convenience in an effort to retain an increasingly scarce commodity: readers.

 

From Chile to Britain and Finland to Malaysia, newspapers that once published in the traditional broadsheet size are switching to the smaller tabloid, or compact, layout. The trend is blurring a distinction between traditionally staid and serious broadsheets and racier tabloids and could fuel an acceleration in the number of newspapers making the switch, experts say.

 

Whether this turns out to be anything more than a short-term fix - attracting enough new readers and advertisers to improve the industry's fortunes - remains unclear.

 

With sales falling in most developed economies as readers turn to the Internet and other sources for news, newspaper publishers seem eager to embrace any strategy that will shore up circulation. Studies show that readers like tabloids because they are easier to handle than broadsheets, particularly on a windy park bench or a crowded train.

 

"People want things in more convenient packages - whether it's motorcars or iPods or newspapers," said Neil Hurman, managing director at Manning Gottlieb OMD, a London-based firm that buys advertising space in newspapers and other media. "The newspapers are just going along with that."

 

The Wall Street Journal became the latest newspaper to announce a physical downsizing, saying last week that it planned to start printing its European and Asian editions as tabloids in October, while keeping its main U.S. edition as a broadsheet.

 

Last month, the New Straits Times, an English-language newspaper in Malaysia, went entirely tabloid, after introducing such a paper as a test alongside its main edition in September. A cluster of newspapers in Scandinavia are making the change this year, following similar moves last year by competitors. Newspapers in Switzerland, France and Bulgaria are shrinking their page sizes, too.

 

Jim Chisholm, a consultant and strategy adviser to the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, estimates that by the end of this year, more than 40 percent of newspapers worldwide will be tabloids, up from around one-third in 1999.

 

The recent wave of conversions was prompted in part by the high-profile decision by The Independent, a British broadsheet whose circulation had fallen to nearly 200,000 from more than 400,000 in 1990, to introduce a tabloid in 2003. The move was soon followed by The Times of London.

 

"Everybody's been getting very excited since the Independent's move," Chisholm said, "but in fact this is something that has been going on for decades."

 

Indeed, the recent moves by The Independent and The Times seemed to make it respectable for other broadsheets that once disdained tabloids - notorious in Britain for pictures of topless women on Page 3 and in America for eyewitness reports of alien landings - to reconsider the taboo. But other British papers previously made the switch - The Daily Mail in 1971, and The Sun in 1969, for instance.

 

Although The Independent's circulation initially jumped by more than 20 percent after it switched, many other papers that shifted to a compact format have had a mixed experience. Circulation of newspapers that go tabloid does tend to rise, at least for a while. But advertisers, which provide the majority of newspaper companies' revenue in most markets - overwhelmingly so in the United States, where cover prices are low - are sometimes more skeptical than readers about the benefits.

 

Because more "quality" newspapers are going compact, the traditional perception that advertising in a tabloid diminishes brand value may be less relevant today, experts say. But Hurman said that advertisers typically insist on paying at least 10 percent to 15 percent less for a full-page tabloid ad than for a broadsheet equivalent, simply because the size is smaller. Tabloids also result in more wasted space, because, relatively speaking, more is taken up by the spaces between the columns and above the articles.

 

In markets like the United States and Germany, where national newspapers are thinly sold and regional newspapers have near-monopolies, publishers face less competitive pressure to go tabloid.

 

Die Welt, a German newspaper published by Axel Springer Verlag, introduced a compact version alongside its broadsheet last May. While the company does not break out separate figures for the two versions, it says that overall circulation has risen 10 percent. The publisher's flagship paper, the populist Bild Zeitung, looks like a tabloid in many respects, but is printed on broadsheet-size paper.

 

"Publishers here are in no hurry to change," said Horst Röper, director of the Media Studies Institute in Dortmund, Germany.

 

Elsewhere, however, the trend seems likely to continue. As newspaper circulation falls - by 1.9 percent in the United States in the six months through March alone - shrinking the size of the paper offers a way to cut costs. Publishers can cut back on newsprint expenses, yet still offer readers a paper that seems "thicker" than a broadsheet.

 

In the case of The Wall Street Journal's European and Asian editions, experts say, the switch will provide additional cost savings because the broadsheet Journal is unusually wide, requiring special press configurations. Some of the paper's projected annual savings of $17 million will come from job cuts and other measures, though.

 

But analysts say changing the size of a newspaper will do little over the long term if it is not combined with other moves, like more effective use of the Internet.

 

"From an advertiser's point of view, we want newspapers to come up with a solution to the threat of marginalization in a digitalized world," Hurman said. "But they have to do more than just play around with the size of paper they're printed on."