Is There Less News Around Today?

Apparently so, because all the news that's fit to print will suddenly have to fit into a smaller space. The New York Times is cutting down the size of its newspaper by making the pages one and a half inch narrower. It's a shame they don't take the more radical step that has swept the UK newspaper industry: almost every paper (even the most august) has gone to a "tabloid" format and found substantial increases in readership. If you want to know what it would look like, just turn the NYTimes on its side and cut off about two inches -- the result is much more compact and encourages the art department to get a lot more inventive in layout, not to mention including bigger photos. It doesn't mean dumbing down the news -- it means making the newspaper easier to read (literally -- the tabloid layout is just simpler to handle).