How to Write a 10-Page Newspaper

Yesterday, The New York Times announced that they'd be reducing the size of their paper to cut costs. Such an announcement naturally brings out spoofs of The New York Times slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print." Are they really going to change their mantra to "All the News That Fits?" It doesn't sound like it.

According to the report, "the newspaper plans to add pages to make up for about half of that loss." It appears to me that the Times is simply employing the same trick that most of us tried in high school: how to make the same amount of words fill more pages. Increasing the size of the margins was one of my favorites. But I never thought about trimming down the paper size. That's pretty brilliant. I recall a ten-page paper I wrote in ninth grade on The Scarlet Letter that was conspicuously triple-spaced with 2.75-inch margins. I wonder if my teacher would have noticed if the paper it was written on was also a half-inch smaller than all the other papers in the pile.

Just wait until the Times discovers Bookman Old Style 14.