A
tabloid is an industry term for a smaller newspaper format per spread; to a weekly or semi-weekly alternative newspaper that focuses on local-interest stories and entertainment, often distributed free of charge (often in a smaller, tabloid-sized newspaper format); or to a newspaper that tends to sensationalize and emphasize or exaggerate or
sensational crime stories,
gossip columns repeating scandalous and innuendos about the deeply personal lives of celebrities and sports stars, and other so-called "
junk food news" or
junk mail (often in a smaller, tabloid-sized newspaper format). As the term "tabloid" has become synonymous with down-market newspapers in some areas, some small-format papers which claim a higher standard of journalism refer to themselves as "
compact" newspapers instead.
The tabloid newspaper format is particularly popular in the United Kingdom where its page dimensions are roughly 430&_160;mm × 280&_160;mm (17 by 11 inches). Larger newspapers, traditionally associated with 'higher-quality' journalism, are called broadsheets though several British 'quality' papers have recently adopted the tabloid format. Another UK newspaper format is the Berliner, which is sized between the tabloid and the broadsheet and has been adopted by The Guardian and its sister paper The Observer.
The word "Tabloid" comes from the name given by the London based pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. to the compressed tablets they marketed as "Tabloid" pills in the late 1880s [1]. Prior to compressed tablets, medicine was usually taken in bulkier powder form. While Burroughs Wellcome & Co. were not the first to derive the technology to make compressed tablets, they were the most successful at marketing them, hence the popularity of the term 'tabloid' in popular culture. The connotation of tabloid was soon applied to other small items and to the "compressed" journalism that condensed stories into a simplified, easily-absorbed format. The label of "tabloid journalism" (1901) preceded the smaller sheet newspapers that contained it (1918).
An early pioneer of tabloid journalism was Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922), who amassed a large publishing empire of halfpenny papers by rescuing failing stolid papers and transforming them to reflect the popular taste, which yielded him enormous profits. Harmsworth used his tabloids to influence public opinion, for example, by bringing down the wartime government of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith in the Shell Crisis of 1915.
