I picked up a copy of the new tabloid Nova at an intersection on the way to work the other day and was surprised to find that it isn’t aimed at complete morons. Admittedly the paper is a light read but sometimes it makes a pleasant change to garner the salient details of a story without having to plough through 1,200 words. The world news was in bulletin form, which suits me because I’m not really that interested in how many people have been swept away in floods in some remote province of China, particularly if I don’t know any of them. Far more space was devoted to local news, especially if it had a mildly sensational flavour, and even more space to well-illustrated trivia, which is precisely as it should be with a tabloid. The business news was short and to the point and gave me enough information to be able to bluff my way through a dinner party conversation. Whether I would bother to buy Nova as part of my daily reading diet is doubtful and the fact that the newspaper vendor hasn’t been at the traffic intersection for a few days may be an early indication that the paper is not taking off in my part of Jo’burg’s northern suburbs.
Finding the right recipe for a new tabloid newspaper can’t be easy and one has to hand it to the publishers of papers like the Daily Sun, who certainly haven’t gone bust underestimating the taste of the great South African public. In England, many of today’s popular tabloids, like the Daily Mail and Daily Express, appeared in broadsheet form when I was a boy. The tabloids were the preserve of the working classes and they read papers like the Daily Mirror and The Sun, which were short on hard news and long on sex, sport and scandal. There was a distinct newspaper snobbery in the UK in those days and you were socially defined by the newspaper that was pushed through your letterbox every morning. My father always took The Times, which didn’t even have pictures on the front page back in the 1960s. It lent an air of gravitas to his train ride to the City every day, although I suspect he would have preferred something a little more manageable (such as a tabloid) in a crowded railway carriage. When he finished The Times he used to give it to me and I would ostentatiously read it on the bus to school the next day and pretend to knock off the crossword in ten minutes by sucking the end of my pencil, furrowing my brows and writing anything into the squares of the crossword puzzle. When the Mail and the Express went tabloid there was an outcry, not because loyal readers feared the quality might fall (it did) but because they would have to reclassify themselves as tabloid readers.
We have no such snobbery in this country and one of the best reads of the week, the Mail & Guardian, is a tabloid. The only reason the Sunday Times doesn’t appear in tabloid form is that we need a broadsheet to wrap all the tabloid inserts we carry each week. Unfortunately we’re still rather keen on credible and reliable reporting at the Sunday Times, which is why you’re unlikely to see any stories with headlines like “Pet tortoise scratches out winning lottery numbers in dust”.
However, I think there’s still room for one long overdue tabloid section of the paper and it’s something no-one else has even thought of. Called the “Dredger” section, it would concentrate on the denouement of all the stories the newspapers reported on but never bothered to follow up. And the readers would love it.