Redesigned 'Toronto Sun' Breaks Tabloid Rules

By: Mark Fitzgerald A new Toronto Sun rolls off the presses this morning, remade in look and content to do battle in North America's most competitive newspaper city.

This is probably the most critical moment for the Sun in its 32-year history. For some time, it had faced competition from three quality broadsheets, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and the National Post, but at least it had the tabloid segment all to itself. That all changed with the introduction of Metro International's free commuter paper Metro.

The just-released figures from Canada's premier newspaper readership study, the National Audience Databank Inc., showed the Sun basically held its own in 2003, with readership down less than 1% over the year to 581,100. But the Metro is breathing down its neck: the free tab's readership soared 22% to 381,800 adults. (As usual, the Star dominated the Toronto market with 1,036,800 readers.)

So now, 10 months after his arrival from Wales, Publisher and CEO Neil Fowler is unveiling his vision of a tabloid for the 21-st century. "The redesign is just 5% of it," the fast-talking Fowler says from Toronto. "The redesign is the signal of all that is changed: briefer stories, busier pages, high stories counts, earned space philosophy, feistiness. We're looking to renew that reputation for feistiness that the Sun always ... "

Whoa, whoa. "Earned space philosophy?" Fowler is serving notice to his huge stable of columnists -- there are more than 25 of them, not even counting the sports writers -- that they won't get into the paper just because it's their day or their turn. "You get your story into the paper if it's worth it," he says. "Well have columnists, but they'll be contemporary, on the day."

This may seem like tabloid heresy. After all, one of the most enduring strategies of tabs and second papers is to add more columnists, which, the theory goes, adds more personality to the paper. But Fowler contends that many U.S. and Canadian papers have too many columnists -- who all-too-often focus on the same topic. "The Janet Jackson breast, my goodness, you had columnists still writing about that eight days later," Fowler says.

Fowler is breaking another tabloid rule: In the new-look Sun, crime no longer pays. That's quite a change for a paper that at times seemed to revel in portraying safe-and-secure Toronto as some kind of Bogota North with thickly leaded headlines such as last Friday's "Gang Guts Lad." Crime news is not going away, Fowler says, it's just going to be in perspective: "For a city of its size, Toronto is a remarkably safe place, but if you wanted to write about drug gangs you could do it every day. Then you add the bombings in Spain or Iraq and it gets to be quite gloomy. I think people want balance."

He also believes they want a lot of news quickly. The Sun's story count is increasing by about 50%, Fowler says. "We've got to give them value for their time."

Stories in the new Sun will be shorter and more opinionated as well, he promises, to recapture that quality of "feistiness." Business news is being de-emphasized, and the stock listings are being eliminated. One durable feature is staying, though: the Sunshine Girl and Sunshine Boy photos, which feature good-looking youths in poses that are provocative, but well short of topless.

To accommodate the busier page, the tab is going to a six-column format from five columns. The dominating red flag has been downsized somewhat and moved to a left corner. The all-uppercase headlines will now be a mix of uppercase and lowercase.

"What we're tying to do is continuous change," Fowler says. "This ahs always been a great paper. I think we just sat back for a little too long."