The Times has gone tabloid: where will the broadsheet revolution end?

First the Independent goes tabloid, now the Times follows suit, though both papers are still available in broadsheet form. The Daily Telegraph and the Guardian may not far be behind. What is behind this revolution? There has been a decline in quality newspaper sales over the past couple of years, and publishers have increasingly felt that some sort of shake-up was necessary to revive the market. The Independent was in a particular trough, with sales at less than half the level of the early Nineties, and needed to do something dramatic. It has certainly succeeded. Overall sales have gone up, and in some areas the paper’s tabloid version is outselling the broadsheet one. The Times evidently felt it was in danger of missing out. On Wednesday a tabloid edition was introduced in the Greater London area.

Whereas the tabloid Independent is word-for-word identical to the broadsheet, the tabloid Times is a slightly abbreviated version of its larger self. Wednesday’s edition was 88 pages (the same size as the tabloid Independent) in comparison with a 48-page broadsheet. If both editions of the Times were identical, you would expect a 96-page tabloid. Stories have been shortened in the tabloid version. (The unsatisfactory tabloid T2 section is inserted into both broadsheet and tabloid. Incidentally, there is an awful howler in both main sections, with a photograph of Maurice Saatchi being passed off as one of his brother Charles.) My immediate impression is that the tabloid Times is slightly more successful than the tabloid Independent. Its pace is better. In the tabloid Indy there are more than 30 pages of unremitting home and foreign news before you finally reach the comment section; in the tabloid Times the comment section comes on page 15, and there is a feeling of greater variety thereafter.

That said, there is no disguising the fact that the tabloid Times is essentially a scaled-down version of the broadsheet, as is the case with the Independent.