The Broadsheet and the Tabloid

The blue-blooded Broadsheet snorts in its Queen's English at the pedestrian Tabloid with its "ah beng" Singlish, and its resorting to sensationalism to attract eyeballs and newstand sales.

But over the years, the gap has narrowed and the line blurred. TODAY, launched as a "Thinking Paper" and in tabloid size, has upped the ante with the establishment centurian Straits Times. When the Wall Street Journal re-sized in recent years, it studiously avoided the term "tabloid" and called its change one to a "compact" paper.

Well, as they say, a rose by any other name, smells as sweet!

Still, is readership so mutually exclusive? Those of us who read the Straits Times and TODAY, may also read The New Paper (the tabloid that is a draw with football fans).

Tom Plate has this view about the tabloid angle:
"... I was discovering a side to myself, as you might with yourself, that might be called tabloidian. maybe there is a little bit of the tabloid inside all of our souls.
That is why serious New Yorkers will read the New York Times in the morning but then, on the train ride home at night when their brains are fried, run their eyes over The New York Post, a terrific "we-have-no-class-and-we-are-proud-of-it" tabloid."

("Confessions of an American Media Man")