Critics joked: USA Today has proven to be one of the most influential media outlets of the past half-century, and “McPaper” now looks like a likely prototype for internet news circa 2024.
But what about USA Today itself?
Once a ubiquitous presence, with its distinctive newspaper boxes and copies delivered to hotel rooms across the country, USA Today has lost much of its visibility as it battles the same economic pressures facing all media, including declining readership and a disappearing advertising base.
Last week, USA Today’s top editor, Terence Samuel, suddenly resigned after just a year in the position. He was the paper’s fifth editor in 15 years and the first Black journalist to hold the job. Neither Samuel nor parent company Gannett have explained why.
In an interview, Samuel, who was previously editor in chief at NPR and a senior editor at The Washington Post, said he helped grow USA Today’s digital readership during his short tenure and encouraged staff to “take more risks, be more courageous” after a series of cuts that preceded his arrival.
Mr. Samuel declined to discuss the circumstances of his resignation, but people familiar with the matter said it was hastened by the appointment of new executives in April. Gannett gave direct oversight of USA Today’s editorial department to Monica R. Richardson, weakening Mr. Samuel’s authority.
Gannett named one of Samuel’s deputies, Karen Bohan, as his interim successor. Bohan, a former White House reporter for Thomson Reuters who joined USA Today six years ago, said in a statement that she plans to focus on “top-notch coverage of big news stories” like the Olympics and presidential elections and “the innovative storytelling techniques that have been a hallmark of USA Today since its inception.”
A Gannett spokesman declined to comment.
Samuel, 62, is the third editor-in-chief of a major newspaper to resign this year, reflecting the turmoil surrounding the industry. The others are Kevin Merida of the Los Angeles Times, who resigned in January, and Sally Busbee of the Washington Post, who was offered a lower position by new editor-in-chief Will Lewis.
debtFrom the beginning, USA Today was an expensive gamble based on the unproven premise that Americans wanted a national paper that was “read second” to their local paper.
Gannett’s late chairman, Al Neuharth, believed that millions of business and leisure travelers each day would be the core readership for such a publication, and he stuck to his vision even when the magazine lost an estimated $400 million in its first five years, the equivalent of about $1.15 billion in today’s money.
Newhart supported the project using the then-rich profits of Gannett’s local newspaper chain, and he also used the labor of reporters from these smaller papers to organize the nascent newsroom of the new national paper, housing them in tiny apartments (some joked they were “mini-pads with free lodging”) near the paper’s then-headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, DC.
(Gannett is now headquartered in New York. USA Today moved out of Rosslyn several years ago and closed its longtime newsroom in McLean, Virginia, in February. Its remaining employees in the Washington area now work remotely or from the paper’s downtown bureau.)
Perhaps USA Today’s greatest historical achievement was its ability to print and distribute the newspaper in big cities and small towns across the United States, and to feature color photography and graphics that were revolutionary at the time.
Gannett used satellite technology and built an expensive network of printing plants and truck fleets to deliver the newspapers daily. The newspapers were sold in more than 100,000 unique street-corner boxes, designed to resemble television sets, and purchased in bulk by hotels and airlines to distribute to their guests and passengers.
Christine Brennan, a longtime sports columnist for USA Today, recalls being in an Omaha hotel room writing a column late one night in 2008. A few hours later, she heard a newspaper bang on her front door. She opened the door to find the latest issue of USA Today, with her column in it.
“It felt like a miracle,” she said last week of the technology and resources that made it possible.
USA Today maintains a print edition, but like many traditional newspapers, print is now on the back burner.
All newspapers have seen their circulations plummet, but USA Today, which once boasted a daily circulation of 2.3 million and was the country’s most widely read general-purpose paper, now ranks just fifth with a circulation of 113,228 at the end of last year.
As print sales declined, Gannett cut back on its printing facilities, pushed back newsroom deadlines, and printed newspapers faster, trucking them farther from fewer plants. One of USA Today’s early selling points, its popular sports section featuring the latest scores, was now a thing of the print past.
TThe 21st century version of USA Today has retained the name of the original newspaper but little else.
Gone is much of the outlandish stories and light-hearted tone that spawned early headlines like “America Eats Its Veggies” and “Men and Women, We’re Still Different.”
The digital presentation is straightforward and conventional, as are the writing and news decisions. Friday’s top stories — Hurricane Beryl, the monthly jobs report and President Biden’s political future — were the same as the top stories on other mainstream news sites.
The Paper’s digital journey has been a relative success, at least in terms of readership: The site attracted 64.1 million unique visitors in May, according to ComScore, ranking it among the leading news organizations.
But “monetizing” those visitors is another matter. The paper has relatively few digital subscribers — just 142,212, according to its year-end report — far fewer than major paid news sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. That means the paper relies on advertising, which is often sold at a steep discount on the Internet. Gannett doesn’t release revenue and profit figures for USA Today, but it’s unlikely that its flagship paper is profitable.
Meanwhile, Gannett’s own financial challenges have been hanging like a sword over USA Today’s head for years. The company was formed in 2019 when the parent company of another newspaper chain, GateHouse Media, bought the venerable Gannett Co. (founded in 1906).
The acquisition left the combined company with about $1.8 billion in debt and prompted a long string of cost-cutting and asset sales. Gannett has fewer employees after the acquisition.
The series of cuts announced in late 2022 included a hiring freeze, a five-day unpaid leave for most employees, staff reductions and a suspension of company contributions to employees’ 401(k) accounts.
USA Today has hired several journalists in the past year, but the general uncertainty about the parent company has led to a kind of knee-jerk paranoia, said a former USA Today reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid workplace repercussions.
The former employee described how staff “paniced” whenever editors called a staff meeting. “Even if it was a routine meeting, the assumption was that more bad news was going to be announced,” the former employee said.
Despite the atmosphere of unpredictability, USA Today has managed to produce solid journalism under Samuel and his predecessor, Nicole Carroll.
In September, sports reporter Kenny Jacoby broke the sexual harassment allegations against Michigan State University football coach Mel Tucker that led to Tucker being fired. Reporter Nick Penzenstadler has actively covered gun violence and gun store sales, and in May reported on leaked data showing guns used in crimes committed by Mexican drug cartels originating in the United States.
(However, the paper was hit by a mini-scandal in 2022 when it admitted that 23 articles written by breaking news reporter Gabriela Miranda may have used fabricated sources; the articles were removed and Miranda resigned.)
USA Today’s staff has taken some hits amid Gannett’s austerity measures and various restructurings. Samuel oversaw 241 journalists over the past year, about 20 more than when the paper launched in 1982. But Carroll is in charge of 285 journalists by the time he leaves the paper in 2023.
The two editors have managed to keep the paper relatively healthy and packed with content thanks to USA Today’s partnerships with roughly 200 dailies under Gannett’s umbrella, where the flagship paper, branded as the USA Today Network, leverages coverage from newspapers across the country and vice versa.
This has led to collaborations on some major stories, such as when USA Today leveraged coverage from Gannett’s Delaware-based News Journal for its coverage of Hunter Biden, Florida newspapers for its coverage of former President Donald Trump, and network-wide coverage of the April solar eclipse.
USA Today has never won a Pulitzer Prize in its 42 years of existence, but its reporters have come close in recent years. Under Carroll’s direction, the paper contributed Pulitzer-winning stories, mostly from reporters at Gannett newspapers in Phoenix, Cincinnati and Louisville.
When asked to evaluate USA Today’s contributions to journalism, longtime media critic Jack Schafer pointed to its design.
“Its goal of being a fast, snappy source of news became the template for many early newspapers. [web] “News portals and aggregators,” he says. Even the original USA Today street boxes, now all but gone, resembled the computer monitors that would eventually supplant newspapers as sources of fast, concise news and information, he says.
USA Today was an innovator, Schafer said, and its current fate is the same as that of all innovators.
“The reason it was so special is because it became so common as other people copied it,” he said.