Hiller said the ABC will release new figures in early May showing the Trib's circulation fell again in the six months ending March 31 - the six months he's been on the job.

"Paid circulation is not necessarily the best thing, and it's certainly not the be-all and end-all," Hiller told the Sun-Times. "What readers care about is, 'Is there something interesting to read?' What advertisers care about is, 'Are there engaged readers?'"

According to Hiller, "The most important thing is the audience." By "audience," the Sun Times explained, he means all people who see the Tribune, including online and RedEye readers, not just those who pay for copies of the Tribune.

Hiller has already introduced the "subscriber advantage" program, which the Sun-Times said gives subscribers to the newspaper more online content, while charging online-only users for access to some material.

"We'll continue to see more of a movement toward a paid model," he said.

Moreover, the Trib now regularly previews feature, celebrity and sports stories in a space above the masthead on Page One, which Hiller calls "the Skybox." And, according to sources at the paper, Hiller has told editors to give stories with popular appeal better play.

The trend toward converting old established newspapers into tabloids includes the old Hearst flagship paper, the San Francisco Examiner, which became a tabloid and has been re-energized under new owner Philip Anschutz.

In Europe the trend to tabloids is more apparent. The Times of London, the world's oldest broadsheet in English, has gone tabloid, and almost all British broadsheets offer a tabloid version of their papers.

According to the Newspaper Association of America designer Mario Garcia, "The readers absolutely want them. The trend is there, and this trend is unstoppable."

Garcia, who recently completed the makeover of the Melville, N.Y., tab Newsday, said: "Since 1984, I have never seen a focus group ... where readers were presented with a choice of a broadsheet or a tabloid, which did not prefer the tabloid. Not once."

And as for moving slowly to a tabloid, Garcia adds, that's more useful for timorous editors and publishers than for the public: "Readers don't care about evolutionary steps - they just want you to do it."

Nor is Garcia the only industry figure predicting that the typical American broadsheet is about to undergo a transformation that will make the universal newspaper adoption of narrow, 50-inch web width look like a baby step in evolution, the Association noted.

In the view of a growing number of big-picture industry experts, the long-reviled tabloid format, once fit only for lowbrow papers devoted to gossip and gore, as far as some were concerned, will prove to be the savior of U.S. newspapers, just as it is reviving the declining circulations of venerable European dailies.

"We expect to see more and more newspapers move to the tabloid format for a number of reasons, the biggest being that readers like them, and the second being that younger people in particular like them," says Len Kubas, president of Kubas Consultants, a Toronto-based consulting firm to U.S. and Canadian newspapers.

Edward Schumacher Matos, CEO and editorial director of Meximerica Media, is willing to go even further out on a limb: "I will tell you this: Twenty years from now every daily newspaper will be a tabloid. The New York Times will be a tabloid. The Washington Post will be a tabloid. The only paper in the country that won't be a tab will be The Wall Street Journal."

Editor's note: