Rotating Executives Stun USA Today Staff

Part of the Gannett Co.’s corporate culture is to change executives unexpectedly at its 83 daily newspapers.

So it was last Thursday when staffers at USA Today were summoned to a meeting and told Peter S. Prichard was resigning as editor of Gannett’s flagship property and David Mazzarella had the job. The next day’s weekend edition was Prichard’s last; Mazzarella’s name topped the masthead on Monday. The staff was stunned.

Prichard, 50, who will become a senior vice president in the Freedom Forum (formerly known as the Gannett Foundation) and executive director of a news museum the foundation is developing, spent six years as editor. He hardened news coverage at the multicolored daily, whose bite-size stories and dazzling weather map originally earned USA Today the derisive nickname “McPaper.”

In the 56-year-old Mazzarella, USA Today gets a veteran newsman and manager who says he intends to build on the news strength and give the paper “more relevance on national and international issues.”

Mazzarella spent several years as an Associated Press reporter and bureau chief in Europe and covered the 1967 and 1973 Mideast wars before becoming editor of the Daily American in Rome. After returning to the United States in 1976, he became foreign editor of the Gannett News Service and then editor of the chain’s central New Jersey paper, the Courier-News.

Mazzarella worked on the prototype for USA Today, launched in 1982, and in recent years has hopscotched the map as president of the paper’s multifaceted international publishing division, a job he will continue to hold.

“I’d like to see more enterprise in the paper, but I was not brought in to turn the place topsy-turvy,” he said.

USA Today reportedly ended a decade of red ink by producing a small profit last year. However, the belief among the paper’s reporters is that Mazzarella represents a drive toward greater profitability initiated by Gannett Chairman John Curley (with whom Mazzarella started out in the AP three decades ago) and his brother, USA Today Publisher Thomas Curley.

Mazzarella sidestepped a question about revenues, saying, “Certainly my goal is to produce a newspaper that more and more people will want to read and advertise in because it’s a good paper. Other things grow from the quality of a paper.”

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