The Courier-Mail - Change To Tabloid

Change To Tabloid

From its inception until recently The Courier-Mail was a broadsheet newspaper. On 14 December 2005 it was announced that the paper would change to a tabloid sometime in early 2006, however the term "tabloid" was not used in favour of the term "compact". This linguistic choice was probably related to widespread public view that many tabloids, including those published by News Limited, were low quality publications (see tabloid for discussion of this size and quality issue). Much emphasis was made that it was merely the paper size that was changing and not the journalistic quality. The last broadsheet edition was published on Saturday 11 March 2006, and the first tabloid edition was published on Monday 13 March 2006. On the same day, the paper's website was revamped and expanded.

The change to a "compact" format brought The Courier-Mail in line with all other News Limited Australian metropolitan daily newspapers. This followed the change to a tabloid format by The Advertiser of Adelaide—another News Corporation newspaper—some years earlier. Despite the claims that there would be no loss of journalistic quality, The Courier-Mail in its "compact" format is not well regarded for its journalism, e.g. Crikey described it as "one of the contestants in a close run field for worst paper in Australia". In August 2011, police and the parents of a murder victim criticized the paper for false accusing their son of a child sex crimes.

The Courier Mail is often used by News Limited to publish news that might be considered controversial in the limited Queensland market, where the Courier Mail holds a virtual monopoly on printed news, before running the same story in broadsheet media nationally against which it may be criticized by rival publications. It is common in government and political circles to discuss if any decision would pass the "Courier-Mail Test", meaning that if the results of the action were to go public, and all the positive aspects removed, how would any potential negative aspects be scandalised by the Courier Mail and thus what risks need to be mitigated early.