Al Neuharth was right.
United States business travelers need a Monday to Friday national newspaper.
So he founded in 1982 USA Today.
The Last Big Idea in the USA newspaper market.
A brilliant idea.
A newspaper that includes the only national sports paper of the country.
An edited quality newspaper for readers with limited time to read.
Full color.
“The only European style newspaper with short pagination published in the USA”, as I said many years ago.
Now they bad news:
They are cutting 10% of the staff.
It seems to me that the current staff number (1,300 people) shows that USA Today is not anymore the lean newspaper that started with the smart loaning program sharing resources from the Gannett chain.
It was a newspaper for a mobile audience.
So this is the newspaper of the future.
The Next Big Idea is a mobile newspaper for a mobile audience that mix international, national and hyper-local content.
As the founder of Williams-Sonoma likes to say:
“We don’t need to change. We need to do it better”.
Tags: Al Neuharth, Gannett, USA Today