The Media

By TOM LlTTLEWOOD

Gannett's new daily: class not mass

IN EARLY March the transportation hub of the nation will be introduced to a new national daily newspaper designed especially for busy people on the go.

Brought to you by the nation's largest newspaper corporation — the Gannett Co., which publishes 88 dailies in 35 states — USA Today will be on sale in the Chicago metropolitan market beginning March 9. Started last September, it reached a circulation of 400,000 in eight carefully selected metro markets around the country by the end of the year.

USA Today has been variously described as: an "extra buy" (because it contains no local news or advertising, the paper assumes that most of its readers also buy a local newspaper); a "quick read" (most of the news items are extremely brief, and the ratio of charts and illustrative material to word text is high); aimed primarily at a mobile, "upscale" audience of business travelers who don't have time to wade through globs of gray type (and who are eminently attractive to national advertisers); a "tour de force of packaging and technology" (the color production is lavish); and, finally, "the television screen frozen on the printed page."

Full of easily digested tidbits, USA Today does not pretend to deliver heavy news in depth. A full color-coordinated page is devoted to the national weather forecast. Sports coverage is one of the keys to the paper's early success; the 2 a.m. nightly presstime makes the tabulation of late scores possible.

Drawn from scattered Gannett papers, the editorial staff works out of Arlington, Va. From there, pages are transmitted electronically, by satellite, to regional printing plants across the country. The Illinois edition will be printed partly at the Chicago Tribune's new offset plant and partly by the Daily Journal in Kankakee.

The decision to begin a national newspaper in an age of information overload represented a considerable gamble by Gannett's management. Gannett has not been as quick as many other media conglomerates to plunge into cable television. Gannett stock is traded by investors. Profitability is important to stockholders. The image of Gannett journalism, therefore, is one of computerized cost analyses, sophisticated marketing and the bottom line.

For the new enterprise, the Chicago market is both an enormous opportunity and a difficult challenge. With its huge airport, railroad station, hotel, motel and convention traffic, the region seems ideal for the vending machine and newsstand circulation methods upon which USA Today relies. But ever since the days when rival Chicago circulation truck crews were armed with baseball bats, newspaper distribution has been a complex and sometimes rough-and-tumble business in that city.

Operating in the urban leagues is a new experience for Gannett. Until USA Today, the company preferred smaller, more placid monopoly settings for its newspaper acquisitions. The two Illinois Gannett properties are in Rockford and Danville, two communities that have been suffering severe economic troubles.

Whether and how USA Today finds its niche in the highly competitive northeastern Illinois market remains to be seen. The Tribune recently converted to a new format with bigger type, smaller page size (translation: less space for news) and a blue banner at the top. But the real competition will be for the second buy of readers whose first buy is a local paper. Besides the National Enquirer and its gossip sheet imitators, two national newspapers already have made their mark in the area. The Midwest edition of the Wall Street Journal, printed in Naperville, sells 20,000 copies in the Chicago metro region. The Chicago edition of the New York Times, which is printed by the Southtown Economist, is purchased by about 10,000 weekday readers. WSJ and NYT both appeal to readers who want serious national, international and business news in depth. Editors, meanwhile, are watching to see what effect the new national newspaper will have on local papers. For the Gannett papers in Illinois, the single correspondent in Springfield is expected to be called upon to devote more time to stories of national interest for USA Today and less time to local angle news.

Elsewhere, editors are more conscious now of who their readers are and what kind of print journalism they want rather than what editors think they need. The Quad-City Times of Davenport, Iowa, recently hired a self-styled newspaper doctor, a journalism instructor from Georgia State University, who pronounced the patient, and the product, deadly boring. Among other things, he prescribed a 12-inch story limit and more colorful graphic illustrations.

There are some who believe the television-addicted, less-educated segment of the population will soon be lost to newspapers no matter how gaudy the packaging. Clayton Kirkpatrick, the retired former editor of the Tribune, said recently, for example, that the newspaper of the future will be a class rather than a mass medium, but that the class will encompass the ablest members of society, which is, of course, the "upscale class" of paramount interest to USA Today and to advertisers.□

February 1983 | Illinois Issues | 38