Connect: The "compact" Irish Independent brought the fashion for tabloid versions of broadsheets to Irish newspapers this week. Tony O'Reilly's "mini Indo" certainly looks well.
Last September, the paper's British stablemate, the Independent, produced a tabloid version of its broadsheet self. Breaking 218 years of tradition, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times has since done likewise.
In France, the liberal Libération continues to prosper as a "serious" tabloid. In the US, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Washington Post are publishing tabloid models. It appears the standard advice given to football teams to "keep the shape" may now be outmoded within the newspaper industry. Still, that sly PR-ish word "compact" betrays old fears.
Desperate that their "respectable" broadsheets not be associated with any sleaze attaching to the word "tabloid", managements have chosen the term "compact" to describe their tabloid versions. You can understand that red-toppery and all it implies might alienate some of a broadsheet's traditional readers. Nonetheless, there's gross hypocrisy in calling tabloids "compacts".
After all, "tabloid" is simply a size even though it's overused as shorthand to describe a mentality - indeed a kind of journalism - often deemed disreputable. Yet, given media's concentration of ownership, many broadsheets are content to accept the profits generated by tabloids within their groups. If you're not sniffy about taking the loot, you have no right to be sniffy about the term.
Anyway, "compact" suggests not only neatness but reduced penetrability - a quality unlikely to endear any newspaper to readers. Furthermore, refusal to use the term "tabloid" indicates how proprietors and managements really see tabloid newspapers.
How must that make readers of such papers, in the Independent group, as the Star, Evening Herald and Sunday World feel? Of course, everybody knows the game but before the rise of "compacts", managements producing tabloids would never say as much. Tabloids then were "lively", "colourful", "simply giving the punters what they want". To object to aspects of their journalism was guaranteed to draw charges of sniffiness, snobbery and pretension. "Lighten up and get a life" was common advice.
Well, maybe the "compact" merchants, desperate to distance themselves from "tabloidness" will lighten up, get lives and in the best traditions of journalism - broadsheet and tabloid alike - call a spade a spade. A tabloid is a tabloid and it doesn't need an ignorant PR term to announce itself to the world. It's the hypocrisy that's shameful, not the term "tabloid".
Still, it all goes to show how PR and marketing have so infected journalism that they even get to decide what to call a newspaper's format. Indeed, the mini Irish Independent has benefited from the fact that such "serious" papers as the British Independent and the Times are available in two sizes. Thus any perceived stigma of turning tabloid has been reduced.
It's been a clever move by Independent News and Media. The group's British Independent was failing anyway and needed a radical makeover. That it has been followed by the once imperious and still powerful Times may have hurt O'Reilly's British paper. But it has helped to smooth the path for the Irish Independent by further respectabilising the fashion for the broadsheet as tabloid.
The move could be useful too if Britain's Associated Newspapers - owners of the Daily Mail and Ireland on Sunday - decide to launch a mid-market daily tabloid in Ireland. By having a tabloid edition, the Irish Independent would have, as the cliché goes, "got its retaliation in first" in what could be a gruelling and defining newspaper war within the Irish industry.
Such a war would be ironic because the Irish Independent (1905) was modelled on Alfred Harmsworth's Daily Mail (1896).
Populism worked in London for the Dublin- born Harmsworth and in Dublin for the Cork-born William Martin Murphy. Even today, the Daily Mail, appealing to conservative, suburban middle-England, remains a model for the Dublin paper.
Six weeks ago, the World Association of Newspapers held a meeting in Paris at which it posed the question: Are Broadsheets Dead? Well, "no" is the answer even though, in terms of size, tabloids have obvious benefits especially for commuters. But both forms have strengths and weaknesses because newspapers are not simply about content but about form too. In fact, like all the other papers with two formats, the traditional Irish Independent and the "mini Indo" are not identical in content, never mind form. Photographs, headlines, story lengths, captions and positioning of stories on pages (naturally the tabloid has twice as many page leads) vary between broadsheet and tabloid. Each demands a different logistical and visual grammar.
Ultimately, few people (commuters and snobs excepted) will switch papers because of format. New readers however, are another matter. Recall that the first Sunday Tribune was a quality tabloid; the final Irish Press was a pale tabloid shadow of a once vital broadsheet. Size matters but isn't determining.
Words matter more: so cut the "compact" nonsense and call a tabloid a tabloid. It's journalism people want, not inappropriate PR.