Shrinking News

Gannett is a newspaper holding company which prides itself with owning about 100 newspapers out of which none is important at all.

Anyhow, they now launch newspapers in the "Berliner" format, which is only slightly bigger than the size often referred to as "tabloid".

The shrinking newspapers is a strange phenomenon. In 2003 British The Independent introduced a tabloid version of itself, and for about half a year, their readers could choose between the full broadsheet form or the tabloid format. Most people choose the more convenient tabloid version, which obviously is easier to read in crammed places like buses, underground trains or supersonic jets. Svenska Dagbladet in Stockholm and La Repubblica in Rome also went for smaller formats, and since a large number of European newspapers have gone for either Berliner or tabloid format.

The question is not really why they change to smaller formats. The question is, "why on earth didn't they do it earlier?" It seems obvious that a small format is preferred by most people.

One thing that has prevented it is probably fashion. Especially in the UK and in Scandinavia, small newspaper formats have traditionally been associated with trash press and bad journalism. To distance itself from that, "serious" newspapers have stuck to big and inconvenient formats - something you would have to fight against to read.

With the advent of the internet, the papers have to fight with all means - even by making themselves readable.