Harrisburg Patriot launches tabloid-style edition. Strange place for one. Harrisburg has no mass transit to speak of is not known is a bastion of innovation. But with 0% population growth and declining sales, they have to do something.
NEW YORK It all started over ketchup. Some editors at The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa., were joking around last September about a New Yorker article that mentioned how misguided restaurants used to be when they only offered one condiment option. Then someone realized: The newspaper only gave readers one option.
"Whether you're a loyal reader with plenty of time or an occasional reader who's time starved, you've got to take the same package," John Kirkpatrick, the Patriot-News' president, publisher, and editor, said of the broadsheet-only model. Eight months later, the paper launched The Patriot, the first regular compact edition of an ongoing U.S. broadsheet. This one's aimed at busy readers of any age who weren't reading the broadsheet during the week.
So far, with no advertising, the new paper is selling about 1,900 copies a day. (The broadsheet's weekday circulation was 102,710 in the last reporting period.) "We started it here without any promotion at all ... and in a week or so we start full promotion so we expect that number to go up," Kirkpatrick said. He said advertisers have gotten on board without much convincing, excited at the prospect of reaching added or new circulation.
"We knew there were a lot of people who read us religiously on Sunday but don't read us during the week," Kirkpatrick told E&P Thursday, one week after the unannounced launch of the new tab. "The other thing that happened was, although we've done very well in our ABC reports, we don't think we're immune from the same forces striking everyone else."
...Feature-heavy front pages and a roundup of bite-sized news and gossip on pages two and three also got the axe. "The younger they were the more hypersensitive they were to anything that made them look not smart," Kirkpatrick said. Readers wanted hard news, but "no micronews," he said, emphasizing the biggest, most substantive news of the day.
Also banished were stock listings and some comics, and the "Living" section only appears on Thursdays in the compact.
The Patriot's news mix cuts some stories to fit without jumps (which brought negative responses in focus groups), and ends up with roughly half of the broadsheet's news coverage. Sports, which is already a special tab in the main paper, is just re-placed for the Patriot edition. The classifieds, which remain a broadsheet, are tucked inside.
Readers also liked color, Kirkpatrick said, so the compact has color throughout, with pages even color-coded by content.
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