Stanford CIS

Tabloids and Broadsheets

By Matthew Margolin on

A journalism group released a study showing that tabloid format papers -- the San Francisco Bay Guardian is tabloid shaped, as opposed to the broadsheet published by the Chronicle -- give readers less of a chance to get in depth news than the frontpage of traditional newspapers.

The Center for Excellence in Journalism together with the Committee for Concerned Journalists both can be found at journalism dot org. The study, entitled "Extra! Extra!", surprised me. Maybe I'm spoiled here with the Guardian, the Weekly, and the East Bay Express, or maybe those reading comprehension scores were right.

Here a couple findings taken from the study:

- The tab(loid)s offer little for anyone who wanted to learn about their own community. Only 22% dealt with their home town—compared with 53% of the broadsheets’ section fronts.

- And only 17% of the tabloid stories, indeed, were even original reporting. The vast majority of stories were wire copy—72%. That compares with 93% original reporting in the broadsheet section-front stories.

- Not only are the new youth oriented tabloids light on tailoring their narratives to the young, only 16% of the stories in the youth-oriented tabloids are about the coveted 18-35 year-olds—and most of those are about celebrities.

The key point to me is that folks who read these tabloids also get information online and have subscriptions to broadsheets. I have an either bulletproof or paperthin idea that the consumption of news has changed because of the internet, and that for the consumers to get the news, unfettered growth of the number of formats actually is a good way to inform an electorate.

Published in: Blog