USA Today

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The December 30, 2003 front page of USA Today
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet
Owner	Gannett Company, Inc.
Editor	Ken Paulson, Editor John Hillkirk, Executive Editor Kinsey Wilson, Executive Editor
Founded	September 15, 1982
Headquarters	7950 Jones Branch Drive McLean, VA 22108  United States
Circulation	2,272,815[1]
Website: usatoday.com

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Allen 'Al' Neuharth. The paper has the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States (averaging over 2.25 million copies every weekday), and among English-language broadsheets, it comes second world-wide, behind the 2.6 million daily paid copies of The Times of India. Its circulation figures are a matter of some dispute, however, as USA Today has many contracts ensuring distribution in hotels, often to customers unaware they are paying for the newspaper. USA Today is distributed in all 50 states.

Colorful and bold, with many large diagrams, charts, and photographs, USA Today was founded in 1982 with the goal of providing an alternative to the relatively colorless, wordy, gray papers of the time such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. USA Today is also well-known for its national polls on public sentiment.

Early on, the initial success of the paper was met with criticism. Many people were hesitant to read a color newspaper and derided it as 'McPaper.' However, the newspaper has striven to set itself apart in distribution methods as well. The paper is still sold in unique newspaper vending machines with curved edges that some say resemble television sets more than newspaper racks. USA Today was also eager to latch onto the business traveler and was heavily distributed through airlines, airports, and hotels in addition to other sales outlets. The newspaper was also among the first newspapers to use satellite transmissions to send the final edition of the newspaper to multiple locations across the country for printing and final distribution in those regional markets. The innovation of using satellites and regional printing hubs allowed the paper to push back deadlines and include the most recent news and sports scores in each edition.

In 2001, the newspaper moved into its new 30 acre (120,000 m²) headquarters in McLean (Fairfax County, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. suburb). Its original headquarters are not far away; the old USA Today and Gannett, Inc. "silver towers", a major landmark on the Washington skyline, are in the neighborhood of Rosslyn, Arlington County, Virginia.

On September 7, 2004, the newsstand price of a USA Today newspaper was increased from 50 cents (the paper's price since 1985) to 75 cents.

Contents 1 Layout and format 2 Controversial incidents 3 Parodies 4 TV Show 5 External links 6 Notes

[edit] Layout and format

USA Today is known for synthesizing news down to easy-to-read-and-comprehend stories. Each edition consists of four sections: News (the oft-labeled "front page" section), Money, Sports, and Life. On Fridays, two Life sections are included: the regular Life for movies, TV and trends, and a travel supplement called "Life: Destinations and Diversions." USA Today does not print on Saturdays and Sundays. USA Today prints each complete story on the front page of the respective section with exception to the cover story. The cover story is a longer story that required a jump (readers must turn to another page in the paper to complete the story). Other stories could be conveniently read without making the reader jump to another obscure page in the paper. This new style of writing was recently imitated by the Wall Street Journal when they launched their updated paper version on January 4, 2007.

In many ways, USA Today is set up to break the typical newspaper layout. Some examples of that divergence from tradition include using the left-hand quarter of each section as reefers, sometimes using sentence-length blurbs to describe stories inside. It is also the only paper in the United States to utilize the Gulliver font, which is used for both headlines and stories[3]. Being a national newspaper, USA Today can't afford to focus on the weather for any one city. Therefore, the entire back page of the News section is used for weather maps and temperature lists for the entire United States and many cities throughout the world. In the bottom left-hand corner of the weather page is a graphic called "Weather Focus," which explains different meteorological phenomena. On Mondays, the Money section uses its back page to present an unusual graphic depicting the performance of various industry groups as a function of quarterly, monthly and weekly movements against the S&P 500.

One of the staples of the News section is a state-by-state roundup of headlines. The summaries consist of paragraph-length Associated Press reports highlighting one story of note in each state, the District of Columbia, and one U.S. territory.

Some traditions have been retained, however. The lede still appears on the upper-right hand of the front page. Commentary and political cartoons occupy the last few pages of the News section. Stock and mutual fund data are presented in the Money section. But USA Today is sufficiently different in aesthetics to be recognized on sight, even in a mix of other newspapers, such as at a newsstand. The overall design and layout of USA Today has been described as both neo-Victorian^[2] and Impressionist.^[3]

[edit] Controversial incidents

• In March 2004, the newspaper was hit by a major scandal when it was revealed that Jack Kelley, a long-time USA Today correspondent and nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, had been fabricating stories. The newspaper did an extensive review of Kelley's stories, including sending investigators to Cuba, Israel and Jordan, and sifting through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was in the locations he claimed to be filing stories from. Kelley resigned, but denied the charges. The USA Today publisher, Craig Moon, issued a public apology on the front page of the newspaper. Many remarked on the similarity of this scandal to that of the Jayson Blair situation at the New York Times, although it received less national attention. See also: Journalistic fraud

• In May 2006, USA Today reported the National Security Agency works with AT&T, Verizon Wireless and BellSouth to compile “the largest database in the world,” according to the anonymous sources inside the agency that went public.^[4] This allowed USA Today to uncover a new facet of the agency and further upset the White House after the New York Times revealed the Bush administration authorized the NSA to wiretap international phone calls and e-mails traveling within the U.S.^[5]

Both stories challenged the administration's ability to spy on alleged terrorists without a judge’s approval, a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act established in 1978. But unlike the Times' story, the USA Today story provoked private telecommunications companies to enter the debate amid the initial developments for the next Telecommunications Act, popularly nicknamed the "net neutrality" or "equal internet access" bill.

On June 29, 2006, a press release for AT&T stated, “The U.S. Department of Justice has stated that AT&T may neither confirm nor deny AT&T's participation in the alleged NSA program because doing so would cause ‘exceptionally grave harm to national security’ and would violate both civil and criminal statutes.”^[6] BellSouth, which announced its merge with AT&T on March 6,^[7]denies releasing any records to the NSA ^[8] and requested the newspaper retract claims in its story asserting BellSouth “provided phone records of its customers to NSA,” according to the Associated Press.^[9] “Both BellSouth and Verizon Communications Inc., another company cited in the story, denied this week that they provided the calling records,” according to the AP. On June 30, USA Today published a statement: “The denial was unexpected. USA Today had spoken with BellSouth and Verizon for several weeks about the substance of the report.”^[10]

On August 17, 2006, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit issues a 43-page ruling stating the program is unconstitutional^[11], but does not immediately suspend the program and grants a temporary stay, in which the Bush administration and the American Civil Liberties Union continue fighting the program's legality in the case ACLU v. NSA.

Taylor’s ruling states the program violates the FISA court standards, which provide oversight for all wire taps. The FISA court provides retroactive review of all government wiretaps and allows all government agencies 72 hours before presenting their case for wiretapping before the court. “There are no hereditary kings in America and no such powers created by the constitution,” Taylor writes.

“We couldn’t disagree more with this ruling,” White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said in response.^[12] “The Terrorist Surveillance Program is firmly grounded in law and regularly reviewed to make sure steps are taken to protect civil liberties.”

In a USA Today editorial, the staff writes, “Much has changed since terrorists rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But one things that has not is that America is a constitutional democracy with checks and balances. A ruling such as Thursday’s is a useful and forceful affirmation of that.”^[13]

[edit] Parodies

Parodies of USA Today have appeared in various movies and tv shows over the years, such as:

• the futuristic 2015 look of a USA Today (Hill Valley edition) seen in Back to the Future Part II (1989)
• a spinoff red planet version entitled Mars Today seen in Total Recall (1990)
• an animated, dynamically updating e-paper version seen in Minority Report (2002)
• a paper called BSA Today in an alternate reality where North America is still governed by the United Kingdom as the British States of America, seen in Sliders (1995)
• Universe Today appeared in Babylon 5
• in Ghostbusters (1984), during a montage, a mock USA Today pictured the eponymous Ghostbusters.
• an extended sequence of Doonesbury strips in the 1980s
• in the Simpsons, Homer reads a newspaper called USofA Today with the cover story: "America's Favorite Pencil - #2 is #1." Homer reads aloud another headline: "SAT scores are declining at a slower rate." After Lisa criticizes it, Homer says "this is the only newspaper in the country that is not afraid to tell the truth: that everything is just fine."
• The comedy publication The Onion publishes a feature on its front page called "Statshot." It is believed this directly pokes fun at similar statistics published on the front page of USA Today.
• The 1988 computer game Hidden Agenda featured excerpts from a newspaper called 'USA Yesterday' in press digests.
• The alternate history movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) features a newspaper called CSA Today.

[edit] TV Show

In 1988, an attempt was made to bring the breezy style of USA Today to television. The result was the syndicated series "USA Today on TV." Correspondents on the series included Edie Magnus, Robin Young, Boyd Matson, Kenneth Walker, Dale Harimoto, Ann Abernathy, Bill Macatee, and Beth Ruyak. As with the USA Today tabloid, the show was divided into four "sections" corresponding to the different parts of the paper - News, Money, Sports, and Life.

[edit] External links

• USA Today website

[edit] Notes