usatoday.com

The first half of the Gannett Co. boss’s career was relatively ordinary.

He ran a company that bought up local-monopoly daily newspapers across the country. The papers (including, for a time, the Bellingham Herald and the Olympian) became more “professional,” if blander and more budget-conscious, under Gannett management.

By the late 1970s, Gannett owned papers (and printing presses) near most major metro areas.

That turned out to be the quiet groundwork for Neuharth’s real dream, USA Today.

Launched in 1982, “The Nation’s Newspaper” never completely fulfilled its journalistic promise, to be a paper whose “home town” was the entire country (as opposed to the “media capital” cities of NY/DC).

But it revolutionized domestic newspaper design and organization.

It revived the old newspaper tradition of short, sharp prose and a lively attitude.

It predated the Web with its emphases on graphics and on juxtaposing a wide swath of subject matter.

It became a companion for America’s business-trip nomads, that small but demographically significant caste of people living much of their years between airports and hotels.

It brought out-of-town sports and weather coverage (and snippets of news coverage) to people living far from their old homes and home teams.

And its success led the NY Times to launch national distribution. (For the longest time you could only get the NYT in the Northeast or from specialty out-of-town newspaper stands.)

No, USA Today never met lefty intellectuals’ Platonic ideals for newspapers. (To do that, it would have to have been an NYT clone with semiotics essays added.)

And even by its own standards and ambitions, its front (news) section was usually its weakest part.

But it added a “new voice,” a different set of news priorities, to the national conversation.