Fifth Birthday : We Take a Look at ‘USA Today’

WASHINGTON —  About the time it all started, Gannett News Service reporter Ann Devroy asked to interview President Reagan and got an odd reply from the White House.

Devroy’s employer, Gannett, also wanted the President to attend the party launching its new newspaper, USA Today. Gannett could have one or the other, the White House said. Reagan would either grant the interview or drop by the party, but not both.

Devroy’s bosses at Gannett took the party.

That choice says much about USA Today, Gannett’s brightly colored and highly promoted national newspaper, which recently celebrated its fifth birthday with a series of nationwide parties, publication of an authorized history and the conclusion of a promotional tour disguised as a cross-country reporting trip by company chairman Allen H. Neuharth.

Three Questions

In part thanks to such promotion, USA Today has been variously credited with making newspapers more relevant to the TV generation, devastating Gannett’s 89 other papers, improving sports sections nationwide and pandering to the most trivial appetites in American culture.

Beyond such hyperbole, however, are three questions whose answers are important to the future of American newspapers and their readers:

--Has USA Today really exerted a revolutionary influence on the American media?

--Are Gannett’s claims that the paper is now a financial success fully believable?

--How has the grand experiment affected America’s largest newspaper chain?

The answers may disappoint both USA Today’s strongest critics and its biggest fans. Contrary to some of the accolades, the paper’s design and color have not revolutionized American newspapers. Nor has its major innovation--packaging news into optimistic, bite-sized bits of “infotainment”--attracted many imitators.

Financial Survivor

Financially, the paper has silenced skeptics by surviving, but its unusual marketing schemes and integration with other Gannett properties makes assessing its profitability difficult.

And inside Gannett, the evidence suggests that critics are wrong: USA Today has not left a trail of clone newspapers or devastated the chain’s other properties, though it has spawned a certain newspaper philosophy practiced, in Gannett’s peculiar syntax, “across our USA.”

On the first question--USA Today’s impact on other papers--Gannett chairman Neuharth is characteristically expansive: “Newspapers generally across the U.S.A. in the last five years have changed more in appearance and content than in any previous time period like that. I believe USA Today has been some of the cause.”

Carl Stepps, a former national editor at USA Today and University of Maryland professor, is more cautious: “I can think of nothing that USA Today invented. What I think USA Today really did was take a lot of things that were on the edge of happening, or happening locally, bundle them together and then sort of dare everyone else to do them.”

USA Today Editor John Quinn agrees: “Everything USA Today is doing we adapted from somebody else.”

The satellite delivery system came from the Wall Street Journal, as did having the same look on key pages each day. The Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle have had front-page summaries of the inside contents for 20 years. Color technology was learned from such papers as the St. Petersburg Times and Orlando Sentinel, which had achieved USA Today-quality color by the mid-1970s.

Sports Statistics

One area USA Today did innovate, evidence suggests, is sports statistics. When USA Today officials approached the Elias Sports Bureau, the sports data company from which it gets its varied and sophisticated numbers, Elias had tried and failed to syndicate material with other newspapers. Today, Elias’s material is sent nationwide by the Associated Press.

Many advertising executives also credit USA Today with helping persuade Madison Avenue to view newspapers as a color advertising medium, a province once left largely to magazines.

But in other areas, some of the claims of USA Today as popularizer seem exaggerated.

One of the most common ideas heard is that USA Today prompted American newspapers to use color. Actually, according to a study by the Poynter Institute, more than half of all daily papers in America were using color by 1983, when USA Today was only a few months old, some of them with USA Today quality.

Nor, did USA Today seem to spawn a rash of full-color weather pages across the country. In the 14 major markets where USA Today first was launched, for instance, a study by the Newspaper Research Journal found that only three of the 25 newspapers in those cities changed the size of their weather packages or added color.

Instead, more than half the papers replaced the standard wire-service weather map with a better one, usually one that focused on their local region.

In general, the hard evidence suggests that USA Today’s impact on American newspapers has been positive and simple: it stimulated an industry now dominated by monopoly newspapers to do basic things better.

In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News had its racks cleaned and painted. Newsday on Long Island added a blue nameplate. The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch got in more late sports scores. The Washington Post added sports pages. The Los Angeles Times bought more news racks. The Detroit Free Press, one of the papers most heavily influenced, improved its TV logs, sports statistics, weather page and graphics.

‘Journalism of Hope’

Yet these details, many say, are separate from the most original and what some consider most important element of USA Today: its personality as a newspaper designed for the TV generation, with its hopeful tone, its mixing of entertainment and news and its quick-bit, non-linear way of delivering information.

In a speech three years ago, Neuharth said USA Today exemplified “the journalism of hope,” an antidote to the conventional overdose of bad news. Part of this friendly, hopeful tone is the use of the first-person plural in headlines, as in the front page story in the Sept. 4 edition entitled, “We head for the beach.”

USA Today editors also consciously mix entertainment and news on Page 1, Quinn said. In a two-week stretch in September more than half the paper’s lead stories were actually references to or capsules of an entertainment story inside the paper, including one about the 50 celebrities to watch this fall.

And in addition to the heavy use of graphics and color, the average USA Today news story averages 180 words, roughly 4 1/2 inches, according to a 1983 study.

John Hartman, a professor of journalism at Central Michigan University, has conducted studies suggesting that this design could arrest the decline in newspaper readership among Americans under 35, a trend that Hartman calls the newspaper industry’s “dirty little secret.”

Winning Young Adults

“The USA Today approach appears to be the most promising current effort at winning 18-35 year-olds to the newspaper reading habit,” Hartman argued in a study this year in the Newspaper Research Journal.

“What we have is a TV generation, people who grew up with a TV by their crib, maybe even a color TV. The average scene on TV changes every three seconds. These people like it quick, they like it flashy, they tend toward a newspaper with quick cuts. They don’t want to hunt for information. And they like to be entertained while they are informed. They like it non-linear.”

Others find Hartman’s hypothesis frightening.

“As a newspaper that is a marketing man’s dream,” said Robert J. Haiman, president of the Poynter Institute. “It has the potential to lead a generation of Americans astray into thinking that these quick hits and short chops with flashy illustrations can leave you fully informed.”

For now, however, few papers in America have gone to USA Today’s extreme of brevity, condensation and generalization.

The matter of USA Today’s finances has been almost as contentious as the issue of its content. Over its first five years, Gannett now reports, the paper lost more than $466 million before taxes, the most expensive start-up in the history of American communications, and much more than Gannett predicted.

The company spent another $200 million or so on new equipment, including presses at its local papers to print USA Today and $30 million for USA Today’s TV-like newsstand boxes.

Last May, Gannett claimed the paper turned a monthly profit of $1 million, though it has since dipped back into the red. And projecting a profit for next year, Gannett says USA Today is here to stay, with a circulation as of March, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, of 1.3 million, well below the number Gannett originally had projected by this time.

USA Today’s great positive impact on the industry, said Chicago Tribune Editor Jim Squires, was that it “provided a psychological boost for a bunch of people who owned newspapers . . . by convincing Wall Street you can take a big risk, lose a lot of money and survive.”

How well has it survived? Some Wall Street analysts who follow the industry have charged USA Today’s claims of profitability, its losses, and even its appeal to advertisers, are difficult to assess, in part because Gannett has so integrated the paper into its other operations that sorting out which expenditures and revenues belong to the newspaper and which do not is difficult.

Gannett reporters, circulation people, printers and ad sales staff often work for both USA Today and Gannett’s local papers. Critics make much of the fact that Gannett “loaned” 141 reporters and editors from its local papers to launch USA Today, depleting the newsrooms of smaller publications so as to avoid adding to USA Today’s payroll. For some time, Gannett advertisers were sold a package deal in which their ads appeared in USA Today, Gannett’s local papers and on Gannett-owned billboards, making USA Today’s own appeal hard to gauge.

Gannett officials argue this blending of operations has ceased. The press room crews that print USA Today, for instance, are now completely carried on USA Today’s budget, Neuharth contends. The advertising packaging, said USA Today Publisher Cathleen Black, ended three years ago. “We have really been standing on our own two legs,” she argued.

The staff situation is even less clear. A year ago, Neuharth told The Times “borrowing” had virtually ended. In June, Neuharth said the paper had 30 such “loaners” on its staff of 250. Last month, Gannett President John Curley put the number at 90, and USA Today promotional material puts the newsroom staff at 370.

Regardless of the numbers, however, Curley and Neuharth argue the newsroom loaner program alone hardly accounts for enough money to significantly affect the books, and many observers believe the loaner program was a stroke of organizational genius without which launching the paper might have been impossibly expensive and risky.

Neuharth also dismisses arguments that Gannett fudged the accounts to make USA Today look profitable. “Well, Price Waterhouse examines the books. And Price Waterhouse says that it’s commonly accepted accounting principles. They are a pretty good authority.” (Accounting firms traditionally include a statement at the end of company audits that indicate whether or not the figures are in accord with accepted accounting standards.)

Similarly controversial is USA Today’s claimed circulation of 1.54 million. More than 15% of that is papers sold at discount to such clients as hotels, airlines and car rental agencies to give away to their customers. The Audit Bureau of Circulations still does not include those papers--which it calls “bulk sales”--in its figures. Thus, ABC puts USA Today circulation at 1.3 million.

Finally, while no one disputes the paper’s impact inside Gannett, the precise effect is debated.

Again, much has been alleged: The most common charge is that Gannett virtually gutted its other newspapers to start USA Today and that, as the Washington Monthly put it recently, “of course Gannett has infused the up-tempo tone of owner Al Neuharth throughout all of its 93 dailies.” It is not so simple.

What can be said definitively at this point is that Gannett launched USA Today without suffering any terribly adverse consequences as a corporation. Despite USA Today’s reported $466 million in losses, Gannett overall managed its finances well enough over the last five years to report higher corporate profits every quarter.

Many critics have focused on the staff loans as a sign that USA Today ruined its local papers. Neuharth does now regularly refer to the local papers, which still are the financial heart of the company, as “the minor leagues.”

Concedes Complaints

He also concedes there were complaints inside the company. “Some of it was kidding. The rest of it was the feeling that, ‘Jesus Christ, I had a staff of 20 and three of them were stars and they took away two of my three stars,’ ” Neuharth explained. “Well, we sure as hell weren’t going to ask for their dogs.”

But Gannett’s chairman argued that “nearly all of the local papers have benefited from having some of their people being exposed to newspapering at the first level.”

It is similarly difficult to judge how the local papers might be different if Gannett had not lost roughly $470 million over the last five years launching USA Today.

Critics say it is unlikely that Gannett would have reinvested in its local papers. Gannett is famed for demanding some of the highest profit margins in the industry--this year 35% before taxes, Neuharth said. The industry average runs between 15% and 20%.

Others in Chain

Some believe Gannett would have used the money for acquisitions, and Neuharth likes to describe USA Today’s losses as less than what Gannett paid last year to acquire the Louisville Courier Journal.

One measureable effect of USA Today is the extent to which Gannett’s other 89 newspapers have begun to resemble the chain’s controversial flagship.

That is a source of concern to some, even inside Gannett. Since USA Today arrived, said one long-time Gannett editor, “a sameness has come over the papers editorially.

“There has been a tendency among Gannett editors and publishers to follow what they told you was good at the (company’s) seminars and workshops.”

Neuharth and his executives consider this criticism exaggerated. “There are some common denominators for Olympia, Wash., and Marin County (Calif.) and Fort Collins, Colo.,” Neuharth conceded. If USA Today tried something that “cut across the board, then our key executives urge local people to consider them.”

A Times examination of one day’s edition’s of all 90 Gannett papers showed that all the company’s papers do not look alike. But staffing, circulation and quality of presses seemed to have as much role as theory in dictating the papers’ design, use of color or extent of graphics. Larger papers resembled one another. So did medium-sized ones. Only about 20 papers, most of them places where Gannett prints USA Today, actually resembled USA Today.

Yet a philosophy toward newspapering was evident. The majority of Gannett papers ran exceptionally short stories. Upbeat features on Page 1 were common.

The majority ran USA Today-style summaries and made heavy use of news roundups. The front pages of about 30, usually the larger papers, were heavily influenced by USA Today. About 25 Gannett papers employed graphics resembling USA Today’s.

Curiously, while the evidence suggests USA Today is both blamed and praised beyond its due, Gannett officials still think of themselves as outcasts.

“Maybe some years down the road when the critics accept USA Today as the Nation’s Newspaper they may even say there was a contribution to journalism,” Neuharth said when asked to assess the impact of his career, “But that,” the inventor of USA Today said, “will take awhile.”

If so, Neuharth and Gannett are doing their best to hasten the reaction. Following the conclusion of Neuharth’s recent promotional tour (called BusCapade), the month of parties nationwide for USA Today’s anniversary and a week of anniversary stories in the paper itself, Gannett officials are now planning a world-wide promotion for Neuharth.

The working title: “JetCapade.”