A mini-skirt design for Beacon Journal?

There has been talk about it for some time but the word is that you can expect a tabloid-sized Beacon Journal landing on your porch within a month or so.

Line drawers met this week to talk about design, but details are being held close to the chest.

Supposedly there will be three tabloid sections: one for all the news (national, state and local), one for sports and one for entertainment et..al.

Roy Peter Clarke, a senior of Poynter Institute, was talking about it a couple of years ago.

“If I were an editor or publisher of a broadsheet newspaper in any corner of the United States, I'd be paying close attention to a powerful trend affecting the future of newspapers around the world: big papers are converting to smaller formats.

“Size matters. But one size does not fit all. Yet the trend is smaller, smaller, smaller. Watch them shrink from the 54-inch to the 50-inch web; from broadsheet to what in Europe they call "compact" sizes: from the "super tab," known as the Berliner, down to the traditional tabloid.

“In countries like England and the Netherlands, converts are popping up like reformed sinners at a tent revival. In places like Poland and South Africa, wild and wooly tabs are testing boundaries and building readership with a reckless democratic energy.

“And while the word "tabloid" often connotes sensationalism, celebrity and sexuality, some of the world's most traditional and historical news journals have exchanged the formal gown for the mini-skirt.”

The European edition of The Wall Street Journal is now a tab

Here are a couple of points made in the Poynter article:

+ Catching the tab spirit should not require you to make a compact with the devil. Catching the tab spirit does not require the broadsheet to shed the monk's robes and don the harlot's frock. Serious tabloids, including Newsday and The Christian Science Monitor, exist everywhere, sometimes dancing the waltz so that no one can see them jitterbug

+ Broadsheets need to catch the Tabloid Spirit. Newspapers that converts soon discover that everything changes: news judgment, content, design, photography, advertising, marketing, story-telling forms, writing and audience. Without lowering their standards, news organizations need to study and adapt some of the best effects of tabloids: portability, tight writing, great headlines, connection with youth culture, devotion to sports, a lively editorial voice.

Hopefully, it will not include one bad trend predicted by another media watcher:

“One additional category that I predict will arise in the next few years: the newspaper that moves to a heavily templated design - that is, pre-formatted pages, including covers, plug-and-play with strictly placed briefs, pre-measured stories, pre-sized photos, whether local or wire, and possibly very strict pre-formatted advertising holes to accommodate it..