USA Today debuts in living color on September 15, 1982


ZAP! POW! WHAM! On this fine morning of September 15, 1982, the newsstands of America shuddered under the weight of a new beast, a Technicolor dream machine called USA Today, bursting forth like a firework blast against a gray flannel sky. A nation of movers and shakers, of transient souls in Holiday Inn suites and airport lounges, finally got its own paper, a paper of the HOTELS, the AIRPORTS and the INTERSTATES! A paper for THEM! The ones who didn’t have time to slog through the leaden, beige columns of the Gray Lady. The ones who wanted their news like their Big Macs, FAST and HOT!

Forget the monocolor, the staid, the ponderous pronouncements of the Old Guard dailies, those venerable, ink-stained monuments to textual heft. This, this thing – this USA Today – it was different. It practically shouted its difference, not with stentorian tones but with a vibrant, audacious burst of COLOR!

The cognoscenti, the old-guard newspaper boys from The Washington Post and The New York Times, they called it..."McPaper!" A sneering, elitist little epithet designed to dismiss the whole thing as intellectual junk food. But founder Al Neuharth, the genius of this enterprise, the ringmaster of this Gannett circus, he just LAUGHED!.

Because he knew! Oh, yes, he knew! He knew his countrymen weren’t sitting around in wood-paneled libraries debating the finer points of the Middle East crisis. He knew they were drinking in a hotel bar, sotto voce, talking about GRACE KELLY! A princess! A REAL princess! Who had just died in a car crash! While the Times was off in Lebanon, getting its trousers all in a twist over some foreign dignitary nobody’d ever heard of, the men in the bar were talking about Hollywood ROYALTY!. And that! That! That was the headline! AMERICA’S PRINCESS! Forget the grim realities of geopolitics, give us the glamour. And in tragedy, give us hope. Neuharth's plane crash headline wasn't about how many died, but the "miracle" of how many lived.

Neuharth understood. He understood that America in '82 wasn't just reading, it was watching. It was flipping channels, it was grabbing sound bites, it was consuming information like a hungry beast at a fast-food counter – quick, digestible, and undeniably satisfying. And so, he gave us The Nation's Newspaper. Not a newspaper, mind you, but The Nation’s. Singular. Unifying. Unapologetically American!

And directly related to that were two other things Neuharth got right - and demanded his editors and journalists get right: a positive, optimistic tone, and politics that cut straight down the middle. 

The elderly, tired morning reads dropping on America's lawns were as black as their one-color ink: "America is going to hell in a hand basket," might as well have been a daily headline.

There'll be none of that, Neuharth declared. Optimism! Upbeat! That was the ticket. A splash of color here, a chart there, and suddenly the news wasn't a chore. It was an experience.

USA Today offered you the news, distilled, polished, and presented with a panache that was practically cinematic. Quality over quantity. Sports scores? Right there! Weather for the entire country? BOOM! With a full color map and graphics The Weather Channel would envy. A little news from around the globe, just enough to feel worldly, but not so much that it weighed you down like a lead overcoat.

It was a newspaper for the jet-setter, the commuter, the diner patron, the guy grabbing a coffee and an Egg McMuffin on his way to conquer the day. It was fast, it was bright, it was — dare I say it? — fun! It was a newspaper designed for the television age, a print counterpart to the dazzling, rapid-fire imagery flashing across our screens. The symbolism couldn't have been more clear when the iconic newspaper box selling USA Today looked like a TV, for God's sake! 


Circulation soared! Other papers copied with color! USA Today was poised for world domination! Those 1980s editions were nothing less than the perfection of the newspaper medium!

So, what happened?

The internet happened first. Not even TV could eventually keep up with instant news, images, and video from around the world.

Second, Neuharth retired. His retirement was official in 1989, but he continued to contribute a column for the next two decades. Yet, his influence waned over time, and without his oversight, the paper began abandoning the style and features that had set it apart in the beginning. 

Stories became longer - like the other papers. The writing turned liberal - like the other papers. By the turn of the century, USA Today's editorial bent and journalism began drifting very decisively to the left. Once Neuharth died in 2013, the paper soon was as far left as the Post and Times. Now that everyone was in color, and all parroting liberal talking points, what was the selling point for USA Today? And internally, employees found themselves devolving from esteemed gold-watch-careerists to disposable commodities, the once-grand company holiday events giving way to disrespect and pink slips.

But on September 15, 1982, all of this was merely an unforeseen tragic future.

So on this day, September 15, let's propose a room service orange juice toast to Al Neuharth, and remember the moment a newspaper became an experience, a phenomenon, a Mc-Manifesto for the nation’s shortening attention span. It was the day the future arrived, with a blue logo of our fast-moving world, full color photos, and cheerful little graphics. ZAP! POW! WHAM! USA Today had arrived, and America would never read news the same way again.

Location: Rosslyn, Arlington, VA, USA

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