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Even The Times has changed its product design and format to attract younger readers with a smaller, easier-to-read format -- which is also cheaper. Both The Times and The Independent switched from broadsheet to cheaper tabloid format last year, and The Guardian plans its own style and format shift, to defray costs. The Financial Times has tried to gain readers through online subscriptions that are cheaper and hopefully attract younger readers, as well as reflect the increasingly online nature of the financial industry, its customer core. Cutting the costs of production The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph have announced plans to lay off 90 journalists, or 17% of the news staff, in part to help pay for color presses. This will hopefully draw in additional revenue as well as newer, younger readers, and defray increasing costs and decreasing circulation. Other papers may follow the Telegraph and attempt to take in more advertising through investing in new printing capacity as they seek to sell more color advertising.

Yet ironically, the tabloids are facing competition, too, even while the major papers have begun to imitate either their content or their formats. The News Corporation's chairman, Rupert Murdoch, acknowledged recently that The Sun was losing sales to a free paper, Metro. (Pfanner, 2005) Despite the decline in demand, there has been a proliferation of free, tabloid-style papers, in Britain, causing an excess of supply in the absence of a substantially increased demand. The law of demand states that as price goes down, demand goes up -- and there is no way a paying paper can compete with a free paper, if the free paper's tabloid-style journalistic slant and format is virtually identical.

Thus although the appetite for news may be present, other media that is lower in price are drawing consumers away, especially in the tabloid market. Supply of free media papers and other news venues is increasing, while demand is going down for newspapers. Free papers have reset the newspaper's price floor. Existing media outlets cannot compete with free papers, other than to cut existing costs and try to take in more advertising. Yet the attempts to have more advertising and more tabloid-style articles seems counterproductive, since this only increases the mainstream product's similarity to the tabloid and free press. Although the newspaper industry is subject to a variety of market forces that other commodity goods are not, one does not have to be a reporter for the illustrious Financial Times to know that as products grow homogenized, demand based on quality decreases and demand based upon price increases. While some papers such as the Evening Standard's attempt to convince new customers of the quality of the product and its distinction might increase readers in the short-term, the Times' determination to cut production costs and to offer something different in terms of quality to increase product distinctiveness might be the wisest long-term market strategy.