Vancouver is one of the few markets in Canada where two daily papers in the same building have to read like two different papers. The same publisher, the same city, the same upstream WordPress® codebase — and a reader who can tell within a glance which one they picked up. Founded 1898, The Province is the tabloid voice on the BC coast: sports-forward, headline-driven, a different cadence on the front page than the broadsheet next door, and an audience that bought the paper for a different reading experience than the Sun’s reader did.
Two papers, one parent, distinct children
That market reality was the design constraint behind the child-theme work on The Province. The Province and The Vancouver Sun both ran as children on a single shared Postmedia parent during the 2011-2012 WordPress migration. Forking the codebase to express the difference between tabloid and broadsheet would have been the easy answer and the wrong one. The shared parent held performance budget, infrastructure, and platform integrations across the eleven Postmedia properties. The Province’s child held type treatment, headline density, image-to-text ratio in the article template, the rhythm of the homepage column, and the sports-section template that did not need to exist on the Sun.
Get those right in the child and the brand reads correctly to the reader even though the underlying stack is identical to the broadsheet’s. Get them wrong and the paper drifts toward looking like a broadsheet with smaller headlines, which loses the tabloid reader without gaining the broadsheet reader. The child theme is where the editorial identity actually lives in a shared-parent network.
The tabloid reader’s article template
A tabloid article template is not just a smaller broadsheet article template. The reader is arriving on a different cognitive setting — looking for the headline, the lead photo, the headline-fact, the colour of the day’s biggest story. The article template has to deliver that fast and clear without sacrificing the same article’s ability to carry a longer reported piece when the day’s story warrants one. The Province’s child theme had to be readable at both ends of that spectrum: the Stanley Cup playoff cover and the long political-investigation feature, both rendered cleanly by the same template, both feeling like The Province rather than like its broadsheet sibling.
The WordPress® VIP platform decision sat underneath that work. Both Vancouver papers landed on VIP in the same migration cohort that carried the National Post and the rest of the network, and inherited the production posture that the parent-theme review had already settled.
- The work: Tabloid child theme on the shared Postmedia parent; type, image, and homepage-rhythm work tuned for The Province’s editorial voice
- Architecture: Shared parent with The Vancouver Sun and the rest of the Postmedia network
- Client: Postmedia Network Inc. (The Province)
- Period: 2011-2012
The pattern from this child theme build is one that comes up on every multi-brand publisher engagement: share the chrome, share the maintenance surface, hold the brand in the child.
