Het Parool swaps to tabloid format

20 February 2004

AMSTERDAM — Newspaper Het Parool will appear from 31 March in tabloid form, fulfilling an eight-year long wish to switch from its current broadsheet format, Editor-in-Chief Erik van Gruijthuijsen said.

Het Parool examined experiences in other countries and conducted a readers poll, which indicated that a tabloid version would be popular, before making its decision, newspaper De Volkskrant reported on Friday.

The Independent and The Times newspapers in Britain recorded strong growth by their switch to a tabloid version and a similar phenomenon occurred in Belgium with newspapers the Gazet van Antwerpen and De Standaard.

Armed with the figures, Het Parool — which primarily focuses on Amsterdam news, but also publishes international and domestic stories — has bitten the bullet.

All of its daily supplements are published in tabloid format and the newspaper’s main edition will abandon the broadsheet format at the end of next month.

The newspaper will be thicker, to the benefit of Amsterdam news. The PS feature sections, such as media news, will remain unchanged and the newspaper will remain a nationally-published edition.

The Parool recently stepped out of the media conglomerate PCM, which owns De Volkskrant, NRC, Algemeen Dagblad and Trouw newspapers and is partly independent and partly owned by owned by the Flemish-based De Persgroep.

Most of the major Dutch newspapers are broadsheets, except for the five-day-a-week tabloid newspapers Spits and Metro, which are found free in train stations. The Spits and Metro are hugely popular.

Subject: Dutch news