Viva New York (Times)!

The Observer reports that those Maureen Dowd podcasts were less popular than expected:

As The New York Times slowly works its way toward a narrower broadsheet in 2008, the paper has another new format in development: a tabloid for the younger generation.

On Dec. 15, executive editor Bill Keller mentioned a tabloid “prototype” during one of his occasional “Throw Stuff at Bill” sessions for the staff, a combination state-of-the-paper address and Q&A free-for-all.

“It’s way too early to talk about it,” Mr. Keller wrote in an e-mail Dec. 18, when asked about the tabloid. “It’s one of many projects that are still in the noodling stage.”

The subject arose during the middle of one of Mr. Keller’s three sessions on Dec. 15, in the paper’s ninth-floor auditorium, with publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and managing editors Jill Abramson and John Geddes in attendance. A staffer asked about local coverage, and Mr. Keller mentioned new or planned electronic products, plus a “possible print product” that would be “aimed at younger readers.”

The noodling about the tabloid, according to a source familiar with the project, has been taking place in a Times committee that first convened this past April to generate ideas about marketing and boosting circulation. After a string of weekly meetings, the group — which includes members from the paper’s editorial and business side — has settled into a less rigid schedule.

So far, the concepts emerging from the group suggest that Mr. Sulzberger’s “platform-agnostic” approach to packaging content is yielding something more like platform Unitarian Universalism — taking inspiration from whatever tradition is handy. The first of the committee’s ideas to reach the public was Urbanite, a daily e-mail newsletter launched Nov. 3, listing goings-on around the city.

Because a Baltimore-based magazine named Urbanite already existed, on Dec. 15 The Times redubbed the newsletter UrbanEye. A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that the company “felt we should create and trademark a name that would be exclusive and distinctive to The Times.”

The tabloid idea hasn’t reached the naming stage, let alone the renaming stage. The source familiar with the project described its condition as more a collection of loose pages than a full prototype. In the question-and-answer session, Mr. Keller said that the new publication could be distributed either inside the paper or on its own.

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But the proposed Times tabloid would not go head to head with amNewYork or Metro on the stairways to the No. 1 train. . . . It would be a weekly, heavy on event listings — like The Village Voice, or the New York Press, or Time Out New York or New York magazine or the front end of The New Yorker, for that matter.

The tabloid will need at least another six months to get off the drawing board, the Times source said. Meanwhile, the committee will stay busy with another outlet for the paper’s newly New York-centered ambitions: a Web site that would gather together city-related stories from various parts of the newspaper, such as the metro and culture desks, and integrate them with service features. Movie reviews, for example, could be accompanied by restaurant reviews of eateries near a particular theater.