Broadsheets

Broadsheets:

At one time, the broadsheet was a very useful form of delivering news. The main advantage of the broadsheet is that it was big, and you could fit quite a lot of text on it. You could get more information on a single sheet of paper. If you wanted to put the same information, on say, a tabloid sized piece of paper, it would take twice the number of pages – and in the days when newspapers had little news to report, comparatively, and would have to be collated by hand, that was an expense and an inconvenience one could do without, if one was a publisher. It was also convenient for the reader – with only one page; the entire newspaper could be folded over and held in one hand while read.

The problem with broadsheets is that they quickly became inconvenient when you added a second page. Folding the paper over produced problems, and the paper could easily become unbundled. Fast-forward about a century or two and today’s broadsheet newspapers seem to be designed with that one-page mentality still in mind. Compared to tabloids or the European “Berliner” style newspapers, broadsheets come in bundles of anywhere from 4-16 sheets or more, they come in a number of sections (more on that later.) Worse still, the format has become inconvenient to today’s modern life, hard to read on buses, subways, trains, and while carpooling. (I would not advise trying to read a newspaper while traveling in the passenger seat of a car – not unless you want the driver’s view of the road to be obscured by the leftmost side of page 2. In a pinch, though, they do make handy windshield sun blockers.)

So, why have newspapers in America not abandoned the broadsheet? Tradition and culture. Broadsheets are seen as the more intellectual of the two styles. It’s true that the New York Post, sensationalist and occasionally inaccurate is printed on a tabloid sheets and the New York Times is printed on broadsheets, so it can be said that, overall, broadsheets are more ‘respectable” than tabloids. But this is an entirely self-fulfilling prophecy – the only reason that broadsheets are more respectable is that respectable papers choose to print on broadsheets. If the New York Times, Washington Post and the like choose to print on tabloid paper, that myth would cease. We know it is a myth because the similar Berliner style has been used for papers like Le Monde, and the tabloid-formatted Guardian in Britain is in many circles better respected than the broadsheet London Times. Indeed, it as almost as if a tribal taboo has gripped the newspaper industry and held it firmly there – a superstition that tabloids are cursed and evil. Beware, for the measurement of 11 x 17 is the number of the beast!

Tabloids, or as Knight-Ridder calls them when they want to talk about switching to tabloid size without mentioning the word “tabloid,” compacts are indeed compact, easy to read, easy to travel with, and have many other qualities. There are many reasons a newspaper might continue to stick with broadsheets – not the least of which is the original reason of being able to get more news on a single page – but so long as the news remains the same, tabloids would be more convenient for urban readers without sacrificing quality.