We now know Al Neuharth, the USA Today founder who died last Friday at 89, was a visionary. He addressed the commuter niche and, ironically, anticipated diminished attention spans. But he certainly wasn’t greeted as a visionary by the newspaper establishment in 1982. That was the debut year of his mold-breaking national product, with its eye-catching color and graphics as well as its emphasis on sports, entertainment, state-by-state roundups and brevity. Above all, brevity. Indeed, very few articles jumped to another page. It was, accordingly, lampooned by journalists and media chroniclers as a lightweight, fast-food for thought “McPaper.”
In fact, I remember the following year (1983) I was attending a week-long series of business-writer seminars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. There were probably 30 of us–from the Tampa Bay Business Journal to the Associated Press to Forbes magazine to, yes, USA Today. It was about this time of the year and coincided with the awarding of the Pulitzers.
I was at lunch one day and the buzz among the dozen or so of us at a long table was about those Pulitzers and the domination by the usual suspects: the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. It was lively, insider stuff. Among those weighing in was the guy from USA Today, who was also taking his share of professional razzing. Amid the banter, the representative of the Philadelphia Inquirer got everybody’s attention by saying he wanted to formally congratulate the USA Today writer–on his publication’s Pulitzer. We were momentarily stunned. Was this a joke? Was the joke on us? Then came the punch line: “for best investigative paragraph.” Ouch.
Good-natured, but ouch. Even 30 years later.