USA Today


September 13, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Twenty years ago this week amid widespread hype and almost instant professional scorn, USA Today was born -- the first national general interest daily newspaper with the colorful page one, nifty charts and bite-sized stories revolutionized the way news was presented.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Readers were drawn to "McPaper" immediately. Advertisers, however, were not, and it took the Gannett Company more than a decade and almost a billion dollars of investment to turn a profit -- but it's profitable now.

BOB GARFIELD:As a matter of full disclosure, I myself was a USA Today columnist in the first three years of nerve-wracking adventure. There I got to know a mid-level editor named Karen Jurgenson. She is now the editor of USA Today, and she joins me now. Karen, welcome to the show!

KAREN JURGENSON: Hi. Nice to be here!

BOB GARFIELD: When USA Today first materialized it was the subject of all sorts of just relentless criticism from people in the traditional world of newspapers, and it was called "McPaper" and was ridiculed for its "McNuggets" of information. But it w-- it's also been praised because it has had such an influence on the way at least newspapers look -- the four-color photography, the full color weather map. Does it frustrate you, lo these many years later, that when people compliment USA Today it's still about the color and the weather map?

KAREN JURGENSON: Well it isn't so much any more. If you listen to readers, we get a tremendous amount of praise from them for the quality of the content of the newspaper. It seems to me that the people who continue to be critical of the paper are a handful of journalists and people who haven't read the paper [LAUGHS] in ten years.

BOB GARFIELD:There's an ongoing debate in the newspaper business about whether newspapers should take a kind of marketing point of view and respond to the wants, needs, desires of its readers or whether they should take a more physician's point of view and give the readers the medicine that the physicians think the readers need in the dose the physician thinks is sufficient. USA Today clearly has been a pioneer in the marketing side of that continuum.

KAREN JURGENSON: Sure, we pay attention to what readers buy and try to give them more of that. But we do it in the context of large decision-making about the news value of stories on any given day.

BOB GARFIELD:Let me tell you my beef with your paper. Apart from an occasional scoop, I can think of maybe a handful of times in 20 years that I've said to somebody else "Hey, have you seen that story in USA Today, because it was so brightly written, because the conception was so unusual." For example when you read the Washington Post and you pick up the Styles section, three or four times a week they have a story that you're practically calling your friends to say you've got to read this, and I just -- that's an experience I haven't had with your paper.

KAREN JURGENSON: Yeah, but we're not trying to be the Washington Post. We will never be a newspaper that is a writer's newspaper if you will. We try very hard to be a reader's newspaper that's edited so that people can read the paper in five minutes or fifteen minutes or two hours if they want to. Now, you know we also don't think of ourselves any more as just a newspaper; we have a web site; we're doing daily television production. I mean the notion of what USA Today is in our view is much broader than the stories that appear in the newspaper.

BOB GARFIELD:Well that actually raises another question because the publisher, Tom Curley [sp?], was recently quoted as saying "USA Today isn't a newspaper; it is a network." As editor of USA Today who has to put a newspaper out every day, did that make you flinch or gasp?

KAREN JURGENSON: No. I'm one of the people who helped develop the whole notion of the network. The USA Today newsroom feeds all USA Today platforms. So for example we have television people who are in the news meetings every day deciding what stories they're going to develop based on what's in the paper. We don't know what the future of journalism is going to hold, and we need to have a foot in as many worlds as possible.

BOB GARFIELD:USA Today is by orders of magnitude a better newspaper than it was when I worked there. But it seems to me that apart from what readers may be telling you, that you just can't seem to make any headway impressing the people in the grayer daily press. Just for example earlier in our show we described a story that your paper broke about disarray in the federal air marshals service that was just absolutely ignored by the other major media. For the last time, doesn't that just tick you off?

KAREN JURGENSON: [LAUGHS] I think it ticks you off more than it ticks me off, Bob. [LAUGHS] You know I just keep going back to readers. Readers buy the newspaper. Readers tell us they love the newspaper. They're faithful to it. That's what matters to me. We serve the public, and they like what we're doing and they come back for more.

BOB GARFIELD: Karen, thanks very much.

KAREN JURGENSON: You're welcome; my pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Karen Jurgenson is the editor of USA Today which this week celebrates its 20th anniversary