When the Gannett Company launched USA Today, the committee that awards the Pulitzer Prizes created a new award category: Best Investigative Paragraph.
That joke was widely circulated in the Washington press corps, which I had recently joined, when USA Today made its debut on newsstands on September 15, 1982. There may not have been a single journalist in town, other than the who worked at USA Today. state-of-the-art newsroom in suburban Virginia, who thought highly of the new company.
The rest of us write serious articles about serious topics, like fiscal policy and the Cold War and the latest USDA forecast for the US apple crop. The headline of the first USA Today lead story was “The Princess Grace of the United States dies in Monaco”. (1) We laughed at that headline’s insinuation that America had royalty (she was Princess Grace of Monaco, American-born actress Grace Kelly). Many of us didn’t realize that while we laughed, our audience clamored for every detail they could get about the princess and her untimely death in a car accident.
We don’t just write serious articles; We write long articles. If 500 words were good, 1000 words were twice as good. Even better: a multi-part series! By the time we finished writing our long, serious articles, some of us were convinced that we knew more about our serious topics than the sources we had interviewed, and that we certainly knew more than our readers, with the possible exception of those who managed to stagger through. of the long and serious articles we write.
USA Today had an unbreakable rule that no more than one front-page story could “jump” to an inside page. Everything else had to fit on the front page of the new paper, along with the “Newsline” summary, an index, at least one large color photo, and other graphics. You had to write copy for that newspaper as if you were writing news for a radio station, and not one that played something serious like classical music when it wasn’t broadcasting news.
All of this was by design, specifically the design of one man: Gannett president Al Neuharth. Neuharth wanted to create a national newspaper for the MTV generation, an audience whose attention span was supposed to be limited to the length of a typical music video. His new paper featured sports and weather (which even its critics conceded USA Today covered better than anyone else), lifestyle topics, genuinely balanced commentary that reflected the newspaper’s appeal to a wide swath of the public, and, above all, graphics.
Serious journalists were, in general, masters of the keyboard. We let our fingers do the talking. Some of us ventured into radio or appeared as talking heads on television. But our employers had art departments, with some magicians who specialized in turning our words into images that helped tell the story. USA Today was way ahead of its time by asking journalists to think of the fastest and most powerful way to communicate. If you could do it in two sentences, great. If you could do it in a single chart, great! USA Today invested in color printing long before any other newspaper attempted it on a similar scale, and it used color far more effectively in 1982 than some of its rivals do today.
Serious journalists never liked Neuharth and, for the most part, never liked Gannett, which he ran from 1973 to 1989. Gannett operated “office papers,” in the parlance of journalism professors, newspapers in which to make a profit. seemed to take precedence over information coverage. news. Gannett kept ruthless control over newsgathering and production costs, and reported steady profit growth during the pre-digital era. This only made his motives and values suspect in the eyes of serious journalists. Worse yet, the company’s newspapers, whose flagship was USA Today, insisted on giving readers the stories they wanted, rather than stories that journalists and other serious people thought important.
Many of the news organizations that employed serious journalists in 1982 are no more. Of those that remain, many are now owned by Gannett.
USA Today far exceeds The New York Times in daily circulation and rivals The Wall Street Journal. The Times and The Journal continue to epitomize serious journalism. Having been a serious journalist myself, and being a current serious consumer of journalism, these are the newspapers I still subscribe to.
But I’m happy to give USA Today its due. While it remains unclear what it means to be a national newspaper in the Internet age, the Neuharth paper has proven adept at capturing the essence of American life in fashion items that are often reduced to little more than a graphic and a few few paragraphs. And today’s young journalists, or at least the good ones, define their craft not as writing stories, but as conveying information with all the tools at their disposal: articles, blogs, tweets, images, videos, graphics and more. These skills should mesh well with USA Today’s philosophy of telling the story as efficiently as possible.
Even the journalists of the MTV generation are, in many cases, struggling to keep up. This makes it all the more remarkable to me that Neuharth, who served in World War II, saw it coming and embodied the future in that first issue of USA Today.
Al Neuharth died a few weeks ago, still scorned by many serious journalists who never believed him. I want to acknowledge his contributions. And now I’ll stop writing, because I’m sure Neuharth would say that this column is already too long.
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1) Washington Business Journal, “USA Today Historic Covers”