Let's talk dimensions for a moment. Because that's really where it's at.

Fully spread out, The Canberra Times is 57.8cm deep and 81cm across.

That requires one of two things: a flat, clear surface or a lot of juggling.

Moving the cereal bowl and the coffee cup up and over with each turn of the page.

Perhaps the pages propped up on a kitchen bench with a little punch in the middle for added stability.

Arms stretched wide to hold the pages out, but not too far, especially in a cafe. Maybe holding the paper a little to the sky to get the full effect of the page.

Crunching it at the sides to narrow it a little.

Then there's the doubling over of the page. The half-fold. The quarter-fold. And when you're finished, unfolding and smoothing down the rumpled paper.

The broadsheet is the antithesis of the mobile phone, that smooth, unflappable 21st century news vessel. It can't be easily carried in a pocket or a handbag or held neatly in the palm of your hand.

In Canberra, never a true public transport town, a tabloid was not really required like other cities that had commuters sitting shoulder-to-shoulder reading their newspaper on trains, trams and buses.

No, we could luxuriate in all that space a broadsheet offered, just like the city started to sprawl over the limestone plain.

We persevered with the broadsheet in our homes and our cafes and our offices.

But all that shifting and turning and approaching-origami-folding has been worth it.

Because a lot of life has been captured across the big, beautiful pages of a broadsheet.

The Canberra Times started publishing, as a broadsheet, on September 3, 1926.

Current print manager, Jon Clarke, says last year, more than 9.6 million copies of the paper were printed.

Multiply that out over the last 90 years, and close to one billion copies of The Canberra Times has been printed. Yes, one billion. And most of them have been in the broadsheet format.

The paper did dabble in the tabloid format – for eight years between 1956 and 1964, eventually reverting back to the bigger form to meet head-on the launch of rival broadsheet, The Australian.

Both papers, at least until Saturday, remain the only broadsheets left in Australia.

And The Canberra Times staff were involved in the production and distribution of the tabloid-sized, The Clarion , published by the Australian Journalists Association in 1980 during a four-week strike over the sacking of sub-editors who refused to use visual display terminals.

Andrew Fraser, now a criminal lawyer, who worked for 25 years for The Canberra Times in various guises including chief-of-staff and Sunday editor, remembers selling The Clarion to drivers stopped at the Northbourne Avenue/Limestone Avenue lights during the 1980 strike when a portly general manager from the CT stopped.

Fraser said he asked the manager if he'd like to buy a copy of The Clarion. The manager thundered: "I wouldn't wipe my arse with it". Fraser politely responded: "That's lucky, because it's only a tabloid, not a broadsheet".

But we digress.

In the early days of the broadsheet, it seems we almost didn't know what to do with all the space. Small, rectangle-shaped chunks of news crowded the front page, like the windows on a New York brownstone.

Later, the power of the broadsheet size was realised, It became the platform for the most stunning of photographs, displayed at their best, expansive stories and hard-to-miss headlines.

Often, the whole of the front page was taken over by a single image when the occasion called for it, from bushfires to royal visits.

We've captured on those broadsheet pages, world events from presidential assassination to landing on the moon to terrorist attacks.

We've reported on issues of national importance, the rise and fall of prime ministers, natural disasters, shocking tragedies, life-affirming acts of kindness, soul-stirring victories in the sporting arena.

We've tracked the progress of Canberra from sheep paddock to cosmopolitan city.

We've honoured names that have been seared into the consciousness of Canberrans – Colin Winchester, Katie Bender, Tara Costigan. We've celebrated the good in our citizens and drawn attention to the bad.

The change from a broadsheet to a tabloid also means another blow to the lexicon of newspapers.

"Above the fold" – the top half of the paper, the prime real estate of a broadsheet – won't matter anymore, for instance.

All the news will now be there in one glance when the tabloid arrives tomorrow. And as you turn the pages, you probably won't have to lift your coffee cup and cereal bowl quite so much.