You hear — usually in competing media — about “tabloid journalism” and “the tabloids.” But doesn’t “tabloid” seem like a weird word for a kind of newspaper? That’s because it is — and it originally meant something very different.
It all started back in 1880 in London. Henry Wellcome started a business with Silas Burroughs: Burroughs Wellcome & Company. It was not a newspaper business; they were manufacturing pharmaceuticals.
Pills were not new in the late 1800s, but Wellcome had invented a new process that enabled them to make an even more concentrated kind of pill that included a higher dose of whatever was in it. Wellcome seems to have also been the one who coined a new word to describe these pills: “tabloids.”
Tabloid became a registered trademark in 1884. Having a trademark doesn’t, of course, guarantee that your product name is going to stay under your control forever — after all, aspirin, zipper, escalator, ping pong, dumpster, xerox, and even heroin started out that way too. The trouble all began in 1894 when The Daily Mail appeared. It was “The penny newspaper for one halfpenny,” and its pages were about half the size of other newspapers at the time. Newspapers today — even the non-tabloid ones — use a smaller page size than they used to, but the difference in the late 1800s really stood out. The Daily Mail, and the other newspapers that followed as soon as they saw how successful the new format was, were “highly compressed” compared to regular papers.
It wasn’t The Daily Mail itself that started to appropriate the tabloid trademark — it was everybody. In short order there were a bunch of smaller-format publications available, and people called them “tabloids.” Then the newspapers themselves began to use the term, including “modern art in tabloid,” “opera in tabloid,” and “knowledge in tabloid form.”
And that settled it. Burroughs Wellcome & Company sued for trademark infringement, only to have the judge agree with the newspapers that “tabloid” had come to mean “a compressed form or dose of anything.” But it all worked out for everyone in the end. Smaller format newspapers are still known as “tabloids” (even though most people don’t know why), and Burroughs Wellcome prospered in spite of worrying that people would confuse pills with newspapers. Burroughs Wellcome is still around — in a merger it became Glaxo Wellcome, then another merger created today’s GlaxoSmithKline, one of the ten biggest pharmas in the world.
