NEW YORK TIMES: At Gannett, he expanded on the company’s proven business strategy, buying newspapers mainly in small to medium-size towns that had no significant competition, building essentially a chain of small monopolies. Then he raised ad prices and cut costs…
He made his boldest move in 1982, when he gambled Gannett’s fiscal success on the dream of a national newspaper. His goal was nothing less than to reinvent the American newspaper, and to a great extent he succeeded. USA Today featured brief articles, bright colors, bold graphics and light news. Modeled on television, it sought a market of business travelers, transplants and anyone for whom six paragraphs about the Middle East was sufficient and anything less than every last sports score was not…
USA Today did not turn a profit until 1993, four years after Mr. Neuharth had retired and after the newspaper had begun shifting to more serious, and often lengthier, news coverage, partly to counter the paper’s reputation as a lightweight but also to draw more readers and advertisers, which it did. Readers, it turned out, also wanted what they need… (more)
EDITOR: This is one of those articles that deserve and require reading in its entirety. It defies excerpting. Content does count. The Lancaster Newspapers should not abandon it.
LNP will never be the kind of quality newspaper worth reading (and paying a dollar for!) that the USA Today has become, untilLNP gets new ownership, management and a new philosophy about what their role needs to be within Lancaster County.
A more ethnically diverse staff with diverse life experiences and backgounds could do so much to make LNP more interesting and pertinent to a potential readershp base that is becoming more diverse every day.
Paying attention, and objectively reporting on issues of local interest (Police accountability, mayoral canidiates, ‘public/private’ ventures) are things that MOST newspapers would deem important, and wouold pride themselves on providing full disclosure to the reading/voting/taxpaying public.
Unfortunately for us, LNP chooses NOT to do those kinds of things…they are far more interested in protecting their cronies and the power elite.