The 'Trib' As A Tab -- A First-Day Review

By: Mark Fitzgerald (Commentary) With its very first tabloid edition launched Monday, the Chicago Tribune eloquently makes the argument that it's time America's big-city dailies seriously consider converting to a compact format.

The Tribune is the first big paper to make the transition to tabloid, and it's not going all the way. The "To-Go Edition," as the paper calls its tab version, is only for single-copy sales. Home delivery subscribers on Monday received the broadsheet they will continue to get.

Subscribers are now getting the second-best paper.

The Tribune's tabloid is organized better than its broadsheet version, which was redesigned in late September. The news/ad mix is undoubtedly the same 50/50 split Tribune Co. dailies moved to over the summer. But in the tab the news content doesn't seem like an afterthought as it often looks in the broadsheet, where ads can appear to dominate editorial.

The Tribune's mix of alternative story-telling methods -- charticles, maps, annotated numbers -- with traditional reporting occasionally seems awkward and unfocused in the broadsheet. Filling up a tabloid page, though, the alternatives fulfill their purpose.

With the tab, the Tribune was also true to its word that the edition would be the complete newspaper, just in a different shape. No articles are cut down. In fact, the tab shape helps the presentation of longer articles, which feel less like homework. In Monday's paper, no story jumped anywhere except to a facing page.

The editorials have more impact on the reshaped opinion page. Columnists throughout the paper are getting back the prominence they lost in the redesign. That's particularly true on the page 2 column of John Kass, who inherited Mike Royko's hallowed space. With a horizontal layout on the top half of the page, the column recalls the look of the space Royko anchored at the tabloid Chicago Sun-Times before defecting to the Tribune.

Speaking of the Sun-Times, the rival tab on Monday had nearly the identical look of the new Trib tab. Both papers chose a shot of Barack Obama at the Lincoln Memorial with president-elect having almost exactly the same expression taken from the very same angle. The Sun-Times illustration was credited to Getty Images; the Tribune's to AP.

The Tribune tab looked completely different, though, from its sibling free-distribution weekday tabloid RedEye, which illustrated its cover with a montage of photos from the pre-inauguration celebrations Sunday. The inside pages of RedEye also served to allay any concern among longtime readers that the the new Tribune tab would look like the fast-read, youth-oriented RedEye.

The tabloid design is a home run. Tuesday, the Tribune will begin to see if the tab, which was available for free Monday, can make a run at the Sun-Times in newsracks and store shelves. The Tribune tab will sell for 75 cents, as the broadsheet had, while the Sun-Times is, as it says on its front page every day, "still only 50 cents."