Manila's Gory, Sexy Tabloids Outsell Traditional Newspapers MANILA - The former president of the Philippines had been arrested on corruption charges. The chief justice of the Supreme Court had been impeached. Transportation workers were threatening to gridlock the city with a strike. But People's Tonight had the scoop: A child had been stabbed while its mother slept nearby. "She screamed as she saw her child's cradle dripping with blood," the newspaper's front-page story said. With trembling hands, the mother pulled out the blade and scooped her mangled kid in her arms. Welcome to the world of Manila's tabloid newspapers. With names like Bulgar - the Filipino word for "vulgar" - and Police Files Tonite, more than 40 Manila newspapers publish in both the format and spirit of classic tabloid journalism. They offer readers a dizzying assortment of sex, violence, gore, celebrity scandal, strange news, spirited opinion and personal advice. A quick scan through the Manila tabloids shows a victim of a motorcycle accident, whose head has been severed, lying in a pool of blood on the pavement with no attempt by the publication to mask the gore. Photos of scantily clad men and women, and some photos of completely nude women, sit alongside columns by priests, senior government officials and mayors. Hard-hitting columnists link government officials and police officers by name to extortion and bribery, a practice not without risk in a country with one of the world's highest rates of murdered journalists. One publication regularly features a cartoon cockroach that can be spotted throughout the pages making clever commentary on stories and photos. A running feature of many of the newspapers is crime suspects with their heads hanging low being paraded before the news media by scowling police officers. Some feature photos of Mayor Alfredo Lim of Manila - a darling of the tabs - questioning the suspects. While Manila's traditional broadsheet newspapers cover the most important issues of the day in English for a relatively small readership of influential Filipinos and foreigners, the tabloids provide the news for the rest of the reading public, mostly in Filipino. "If you combine the circulation of the tabloids, they have a much larger readership than the broadsheets," said Marites Vitug, a respected Manila journalist and president of the Journalism for Nation Building Foundation. Circulation figures are not verified for Manila newspapers, either mainstream broadsheets or tabloids, but the broadsheet Manila Bulletin says on its Web site that it prints 300,000 copies per day. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports a daily circulation of 260,000. The actual circulation of the tabloids is anybody's guess. Some publishers claim figures exceeding 350,000 per day. Others joke that their circulation varies from 30,000 to 500,000 depending on whether they are talking to an advertiser or a tax auditor. What everyone seems to agree on is that the tabloids, over all, outsell the broadsheets and that they make money. "Because they run on smaller production and editorial budgets, tabloids are sometimes more profitable ventures than broadsheets," said the German research group Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, in the Philippines chapter of its report Asian Media Barometer 2011. One indicator of their profitability is the fact that the major mainstream newspapers in Manila - The Philippine Daily Inquirer, The Manila Bulletin and The Philippine Star - all print tabloid versions of their broadsheet editions. Like other major tabloids here, they profit less from advertising than from low overhead and high-volume street sales. The dozens of smaller, shadier tabloids that operate in Manila find other ways to make a profit. Some are run as completely underground operations. They do not have advertising, a business license, a taxpayer identification number or office contact information published in their pages. Much of their content is soft-core pornography lifted from the Internet and political attack articles sold to the highest bidder.