Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a tabloid newspaper, also attrib.

1929		W. Winchell Your Broadway & Mine 11 Jan. [synd. col.] ‘Why,’ asked a tab reporter [...] ‘did she go to the coast?’.
1930		R. Whitfield Green Ice (1988) 36: I see by the tabs you’re looking for me.
1942		W. Winchell On Broadway 28 Jan. [synd. col.] Harlem gets a new tab paper, ‘People’s Voice’.
1951		M. Spillane One Lonely Night 16: The tab was opened to a news account of my trial.
1999		Guardian Editor 15 Oct. 5: Funny how Fergie has been so fab for the tabs.
2002		Observer 31 Mar. 21: Why, then, is there so much nastiness around – not just in the tabs, but the broadsheets too?
2024		J. Meades Empty Wigs (t/s) 324: The Hon Mrs Justice Haskard-Levack’s only daughter Demelza had died five years earlier from a cocaine overdose. [...] The tabs had a field day.