A quarter for USA Today
A quarter century, that is.
When CNN started up, critics laughed at the idea that anyone would watch that much news often enough for it to last. Look who’s laughing now.
When USA Today started up, critics scoffed that it was ‘news lite’, a breezy, almost comic-book looking paper that used lots of color and relatively little content to grab the attention of people with shorter attention spans – or less time – than, say, readers of the more dense and detailed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post….
As a career journalist and de facto news hound, I admit I didn’t pay much attention to USA Today for a long time. When I pause long enough for a newspaper in hand, it’s either WSJ, Chicago Tribune, sometimes the International Herald Tribune when traveling, or The Economist, which calls itself a paper. And I scan NYT, Bloomberg, Forbes, Reuters, WaPo, UK Guardian and others online.
So USA Today didn’t fit into this universe of serious news sources for a long time. Until getting complimentary copies at hotels, and finding it in bins or on tables in public places. Now, I’m looking at it more often.
So is their competition. The fast-grab newspaper has become the most circulated one in the country. Turning the quarter century mark and headed into a higher-tech future of new information sources, USA Today is…somehow…managing to get more business. That must be saying that we want color, splash, and short news bites. “McPaper” seems to be here to stay.