The excellent web site I Want Media recently posted an interview with Andrew Gowers, head honcho at London's Financial Times. The paper was labelled recently the world's best newspaper following an international survey of opinion leaders.
While that title should be open to a broader discussion of the criteria used, the FT is clearly a terrific paper, despite that newsprint color.
What caught my attention was his comment: "We have no plans to go tabloid, for a host of good reasons. In my view the tabloid format dumbs journalism down -- it oversimplifies complex issues and emphasizes froth over substance."
How in the heck can a format be responsible for bad journalism? True, in the minds of the Great Unwashed around the world, the term"tabloid journalism" has a pejorative spin, but it is irresponsible for a media baron to go along with it. It is true that many tab-sized "news" products are pretty awful, but are they really newspapers? Does the Great Unwashed make that connection? I doubt it.
Given that a move to a smaller format for most broadsheets is almost inevitable if paper products are to remain viable, reinforcing the tabloid myth now might be terrible timing.
I am pretty sure the good tab newspapers don't "dumb down" the news just because the page is smaller, just as I am fairly certain that magazines such as The Atlantic don't dumb down content because of a mere 8 1/2 by 11 inch size.
The trick is to prepare people for the future new sizes by slowly getting rid of the myth. Maybe the problem will take care of itself as more and more broadsheets make the switch to tabloid or even Berliner format.
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