The twin-edition thing HAS been done before
As we mentioned earlier, we take issue with this passage from Tribune media columnist Phil Rosenthal’s coverage of today’s big Trib tab announcement:
Tribune executives said they believe publishing near-identical versions of the paper simultaneously in broadsheet and compact editions is unprecedented among major U.S. dailies.
Our recollection — backed up by a two-year-old Alan Jacobson column we found in our bookmark collection — was that the Patriot News of Harrisbug, Pa., had published twin editions for a while, a few years ago.
We showed all this to Patriot News editor David Newhouse and asked him to set us straight.
David replies:
Either we are not a “major” newspaper in the eyes of the Trib — even though we bested Philly and Pittsburgh to be named Pennsylvania Newspaper of the Year from 2004-2007 — or the Trib staffers in Chicago have never heard of us and probably couldn’t find Harrisburg on a map. In any case, we humble journalists in central Pennsylvania salute their efforts — which are not unprecedented.
In 2005, we published simultaneous broadsheet and tab editions of our newspaper. They were available side-by-side on the newsstand and readers could opt for either one home delivered. The tab was a condensed version of our main paper, with some differences, aimed at busy readers. We published the twin editions for five months, and the tab was well-received by readers but the overall economics led us to discontinue the effort.
We actually learned a lot of lessons from the experience — lessons about what busy readers want and don’t want, lessons about who our busy readers are (hint: they aren’t the same people every day) and lessons about how to blend the desire for quick news with an equal and often coexisting desire for in-depth stories that readers have not heard elsewhere. We are incorporating all these lessons into our own comprehensive redesign set to debut this spring.
Actually, “redesign” is a misnomer. We’re keeping our existing fonts and color palette, and the paper will look quite similar in a purely visual sense. Rather, this will be a radical re-imagining, a reboot of the daily newspaper to fit the needs of print readers in a digital age.
And there you have it.
In our earlier post, we quoted Alan Jacobson’s essay:
For the first time in America, readers were given a choice of getting their newspaper in either broadsheet or tab format. This option was available to subscribers and single-copy purchasers.
For six months, the Patriot-News sold 100,000 papers in broadsheet format and about 1,000 in tab format – that’s a 100-to-1 preference for broadsheet to tab.
Alan, in turn, quoted Patriot-News publisher John Kirkpatrick:
The future of the newspaper industry might well be a tabloid edition. We haven’t, however, been able to prove it here.
We’ve proved that a lot of occasional readers really like the compact format. We’ve also proved that turning them into regular buyers has been incredibly daunting.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
We also ran a story about Patriot-News’ compact edition in Newspapers & Technology in summer 2005. I suppose a slight difference is that the Trib says content in both compact and broadsheet will be identical, where The Patriot’s content didn’t necessarily mirror that of The Patriot-News. (I know, it’s a quibble.)
January 13th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
On 18 April 2005, the The New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur offered readers a choice of broadsheet or tabloid size. After six months of producing both sizes the newspaper terminated a 160-year-old tradition of being a broadsheet.
The New Straits Times in KL has more in common with a major U.S. city newspaper. Like the London papers (The Independent an The Times) The NST didn’t trim a word to make the tabloid edition.
And just like the the London papers - this tabloid looked horrible at first. They just shoveled the stories onto pages wherever they fit.
All three converted papers have since redesigned into better organized and attractive tabs, but that was not their goal at first.
The first thing all these publishers wisely did was to hammer home in their messages to readers was that there was NOT any cut in content.