The Wall Street Journal is making itself 20 per cent narrower to attempt to reduce rising newspaper costs.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

THE Wall Street Journal, which is reducing its international editions to tabloid size later this month, announced yesterday that it was shrinking the width of its United States edition as part of a $100 million overhaul of the newspaper. The change is intended, in part, to save on the rising cost of paper.

The new domestic Journal, to appear in January 2007, will go from about 15 inches wide to about 12 inches wide and will remain about 22¾ inches long. It will be roughly the size of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, other daily newspapers that have reduced their widths.

The Journal's move is part of a broad retrenchment in the newspaper industry, as costs rise faster than revenues and newspaper companies cut jobs. But the big size change at The Journal reflects bigger problems at the paper, which has been hit especially hard by a loss of advertising revenue.

A spokeswoman for The New York Times said the paper was considering going to a smaller width, but had not made a decision. The Times currently measures about 14 inches wide.

Given the widespread concern over the price of newsprint, which has soared 40 percent in the last three years, more broadsheets could shrink even further, to tabloid size, over the next few years and convert to lighter paper stock. The industry's desire to cut printing costs could even hasten development of so-called e-paper, an electronic version of a newspaper that can be printed by the reader.