Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

TABLOID NOUVEAU GENRE

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 2; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17512780802281123

1751-2794

Colette Brin, Geneviève Drolet,

Cultural Insights and Digital Impacts

Abstract Faced with growing competition and dwindling readership, especially among young people, some metropolitan newspapers have switched from a broadsheet to a smaller, easier to handle format. This strategy has been successful at least in the short term, and has been applied recently in Quebec by small-market newspapers owned by the Gesca chain. In April 2006, Le Soleil, the second-largest daily of the group, adopted a compact format and new design, accompanied by new content sections, changes in newsroom staff and management, as well as an elaborate marketing plan. In announcing the change to its readers, an article by the editor-in-chief focused on adapting the newspaper's content to readers' lifestyles and interests, as well as developing interactivity. The plan was met with some resistance in the newsroom and among readers. Based on a theoretical model of long-term change in journalism, briefly set out in the article, this study analyzes this case as it compares to the "communication journalism" paradigm. Specifically, it examines how tensions between competing conceptions of journalism are manifest in Le Soleil's own coverage of the format change. Keywords: communication journalismformat changejournalism historyjournalistic meta-discoursenewspaperstabloidization Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Daniel Giroux, Jean Charron, Jean de Bonville, Ulric Deschênes, and Philippe Marcotte for their assistance and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Notes 1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_newspaper. 2. This key concept for the present study is defined in the next section of the article. 3. For a cogent analysis of the concept's application to news media production, see Hollifield (2006 Hollifield , C. Ann 2006 "News Media Performance in Hypercompetitive Markets: an extended model of effects" , International Journal on Media Management 8 ( 2 ), pp. 60 – 9 .[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). 4. This notion, borrowed from Giddens (1984 Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society. Outline of the theory of structuration, Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]), designates the ability of social agents to verbalize the reasons for their actions, as opposed to "practical consciousness", i.e., knowing how to act in social situations. 5. Charron and de Bonville define the newspaper system as a population of newspapers and journalists circumscribed in time and space (2004d, p. 224), characterized by relationships of interdependence and competition between agents within the system's boundaries. For the purposes of the present study, in the current context of convergence, we have opted for a more extensive term including broadcast as well as print media. 6. See http://www.powercorporation.com/index.php. 7. The Montreal metropolitan area is the only large urban market in Quebec, with six dailies and the headquarters of all national French-language media groups. The population of Montreal area (3.6 million) is about half the population of the province of Quebec (7.6 million), while Quebec City has a population of about 540,000 (Institut de la statistique du Québec, 2008 Institut De La Statistique Du Québec 2008 "La Capitale-Nationale ainsi que ses municipalités régionales de comté (MRC) et territoire équivalent (TE)" , http://www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/regions/profils/region_03/region_03_00.htm , accessed 12 August 2008 . [Google Scholar]; Statistics Canada, 2008 Statistics Canada 2008 "Portrait of the Canadian Population in 2006: findings" , http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census06/analysis/popdwell/index.cfm , accessed 12 August 2008 . [Google Scholar]). 8. These figures do not include two free dailies distributed in Montreal, Métro Montréal (owned by Transcontinental, 60 per cent; Metro International, 25 per cent; Gesca, 15 per cent) and 24 heures (Quebecor), as circulation numbers do not represent readership in the same proportions (Centre d'études sur les médias, 2008 Centre D'études Sur Les Médias 2008 "Portrait de la propriété dans le secteur des quotidiens au Québec et au Canada" , http://www.cem.ulaval.ca/concentration.html , accessed 12 August 2008 . [Google Scholar]). 9. See http://www.fpjq.org. 10. All quotes from Le Soleil have been translated by the authors of this article. 11. This editorial was written two weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which may explain in part the insistence on international news. Still, Dubuc explains the changes were made during the summer months of 2001. 12. Le Soleil's circulation appears to have benefited, perhaps temporarily, from a labour conflict at Le Journal de Québec from April 2007 to August 2008. During this period, locked-out journalists also published their own free daily, MédiaMatinQuébec, with funding from various labour organizations. 13. Le Quotidien and Le Droit were already tabloids before the transaction. 14. A slight reduction of the broadsheet format design was done for this reason a decade earlier (Corbeil, 1996 Corbeil , Michel 1996 "Les quotidiens se font petits!" , Le Soleil , 14 February , p. A 9 . [Google Scholar]). 15. "[P]is, vous le trouvez comment votre nouveau Soleil?" 16. "[E]t une fois l'habitude prise, ma bande de snoros, vous allez être les premiers à ne plus pouvoir vous en passer, vous m'en donnerez des nouvelles."