The origins and demise of the broadsheet

Posted by John Burke on March 22, 2005 at 12:32 PM

Jack Shafer at Slate has written an interesting posting entitled "The myth of the broadsheet," in which he shows two possible origins of the broadsheet newspaper. One, espoused in a New York Times' article about a New Jersey daily switching to compact (see former posting), places the first broadsheet back to the early 1700s when the British crown placed a paper tax per page on newspapers. The logical response of the papers; increase the size of the page to fit more text. Another argument found in a 1994 book called "Seeing the Newspaper" by Kevin G. Barnhurst shows that in the same era, manuscript sheets were already originally larger, and that if they grew because of the British tax, they would have shrunk once the tax was repealed in 1855. But British broadsheets lasted 150 years after the tax was repealed. 150 years? Hmmm. Publishers must have had a "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. But the broadsheet has been "broke" for the past 20 years with serious circulation problems that publishers haven't been able to cure. Will compacts provide the remedy, or are they just another ploy that temporarily eases publishers' woes?

Source: Slate

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