I've been watching you, dear reader. Like a sheepish girlfriend, hoping her beau would take notice of a new hairstyle, I've been staking out random stacks of newspapers on campus, hoping you'd recognize our own new do.

And the reactions I've caught so far are priceless.

"It looks like a tabloid," goes a popular one.

The truth is, the Justice does share its format with such reputable rags as The National Enquirer and The New York Post.

It always has.

In the printing world, all this word means is a page half the size of a broadsheet like The Boston Globe or USA Today and twice the size of the paper you likely have in your inkjet.

But those readers who compared the Justice to a tabloid (after the changes we made to our layout last week), were probably referring more specifically to the type of newspaper that some love to hate and others, sadly, just love.

The word has a storied history.

In 1878, Henry Wellcome, an American entrepreneur, opened up a pharmaceutical business in London with partner Silas Burroughs. Wellcome was in search of a moniker for a new, condensed pill he had created.

"Tablet," part of the English vernacular since the 16th century, wasn't sufficient. So Wellcome appended the suffix "-oid," meaning "having the form or likeness of." Later, the firm started using tabloid for other products such as chemicals and tea.

The hitch came, according to Michael Quinion, an editor of The Oxford English Dictionary, when toward the end of the century Londoners started calling anything and everything of a compressed size a "tabloid."

After the Daily Mail, which bore the slogan, "The penny newspaper for one halfpenny," hit London's newsstands in 1896, it was only a matter of time before the "tabloid newspaper" was born. Today, "tabloid" refers exclusively to a newspaper and, more particularly, to the types that serve as fodder for media critics.

Recently, however, reputable daily broadsheets have attempted to legitimize the format for the first time in its 100 year history. When the Independent of London published a tab-size edition in September 2003, it was one of the first high-circulation dailies to employ the tabloid style without its corresponding bad taste.

Of course, the Independent shied away from using the once-benign-but-now-pejorative "tabloid" designation, opting instead for "compact."

What editors the world over are realizing is that the broadsheet's days are numbered. And it's not only the size of the page that is changing, it's also how stories are presented.

It is an all-too-common assumption that graphically intense layout, rife with reading aids like story titles, summary boxes and pull-quotes-the stuff of tabloids both bad and good-is symptomatic of dummying down the news.

This is far from the truth. A real-world editor once told me that if newspapers were to survive into the future, editors would have to "think with their stomachs." She would say the belief that news should be presented raw, without analysis or context, amounts to journalistic arrogance.

Instead, journalists-and their editors-must show the reader why a story is compelling. And this effect is achieved most forcefully through inviting design.

With this in mind, our look has become louder. But we're not about to start sexing up news-either with page 3 girls or far-flung stories about a Peoria-based, 2,000 pound Elvis.

We're just not that kind of tabloid.