Continuation of The Next Generation   

As USA Today positions itself in the big leagues, it is still battling some cultural and journalistic tensions. Founder Neuharth, who didn't return calls or e-mail requests for comment for this story, and others launched a national paper that needed less than two decades to assert itself as a major player. He did so with a small, scrappy staff that included dozens of "loaners" from other Gannett papers--reporters who were prepared to return home if Neuharth's experiment failed.

"It was uncharted territory for a company and a lot of journalists who had young and midcareer lives working for community and small and midsize papers and not really playing with the national powerhouses," says Denver correspondent O'Driscoll.

O'Driscoll came from the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal (now the Reno Gazette-Journal) in January 1983. "It was both heady and a little daunting," he says of the early days. "There was a combination of the small-town 'gee-whiz' and a bit of a fear factor, a 'What am I doing going up against big national papers?' " He left for the Denver Post in 1989 and returned to USA Today in 1997 when it opened its Denver bureau. "The paper has mostly overcome that mind-set," O'Driscoll says, "but it clearly was there when I was first there, and there are some vestiges today."

A common complaint among reporters who have joined the paper in the last five to 10 years is that the paper needs to attract more editors who have experience overseas or at big metropolitan dailies. Some describe a lack of sophistication in editing, while others characterize the problem as too little trust among editors in reporters' instincts.

In August 2003, Jurgensen met with reporters and editors in the Washington bureau for more than an hour. The reporters who work there decried the "endless second-guessing" of their stories, saying too many editors were involved, according to notes of the meeting obtained by AJR.

They said "institutional insecurity" at the paper means no one feels empowered to make decisions and that line editors are unwilling to say a story is good before hearing that their superiors agree. They said their ideas have to be validated by "six other news organizations before there's consensus that they're worth pursuing," which makes the paper late on some stories it could have had first.

Reporters described their frustration at the difficulty of getting good work into the paper. They said everybody spends too much time guessing how Gallagher will react and that the process has made the paper slow to respond to breaking stories, including the Washington-area sniper killings. Journalists also complained about a shift away from reporters driving coverage, saying the assignment editors who oversee reporters don't fight for their work and "often seem compelled to talk reporters out of pursuing stories, rather than encouraging them to go after stories."

Some reporters shared concerns about "forced" trend stories and pressures to try to create trends where none exists. Others warned of a "whomp-up factor" in which a desire for impact sometimes causes an editor to add sentences or paragraphs that can be wrong or distort the story. These concerns, reporters said, were contributing to a "degradation of the camaraderie in the newsroom and a budding us vs. them environment," compounded by a "harsh" review process for evaluating reporters' work.

The notes state Jurgensen "seemed taken aback" and said if there is a "cultural issue," she wants to address it. She responded that if the impression exists that ideas are coming solely from the top down, "that's a horrible indictment." She said she wants newsrooms with devoted, upbeat people and doesn't like hearing that the situation is the opposite--a sentiment she reiterated when I interviewed her in her office in mid-February.

"I'm always concerned when staffers think there are things that need to be addressed," Jurgensen told me. "I want an organization where people feel empowered." She said the concerns raised in the Washington bureau represented a "small part" of the paper and its four sections--News, Life, Money and Sports.

Bureau staffers say the late intervention in stories declined slightly after the meeting, but the top-down approach and institutional anxiety over decision-making remain.

"Everyone at USA Today, from reporters to top management, is under a lot of pressure," says Kathy Kiely, a congressional reporter who has been at the paper for five years. "Our mission is to out-think, out-report and out-write competitors who have far more resources in terms of personnel and newshole than we do. The pressure can be exhilarating when it pushes you to go beyond what you thought you could do. But it can be demoralizing when we go after each other for falling short of goals that are very hard to meet."

Bob Davis, a reporter in the Life section, wrote an acclaimed three-day series about the performance of emergency medical services in the nation's 50 largest cities. The paper nominated his series, published last summer, for the Pulitzer, and top editors speak of his work with pride. But Davis once experienced the downside of editors' high expectations.

In the mid-1990s, after Ritter left the Money section and became ME for news, "I was one of the victims of the concerted effort to reinvent the newsroom and get more experienced, seasoned national reporters in there," Davis says. "Many of us who came as loaners from small Gannett papers were pushed out. I was covering aviation safety at the time and was, I thought, pretty successful, but they [Ritter and his deputies] didn't think my work was up to their standards."

During his nine months on probation, Davis covered the 1996 TWA 800 crash and the subsequent investigation. The New York Times was reporting that a criminal act, such as a bomb, might have caused the crash, but Davis' sources were telling him it appeared to be a mechanical problem. The results of the investigation later vindicated his work, but he felt he never regained his editors' trust. Near the end of Davis' probationary period, his immediate editor told him to start looking for another job.

Davis managed to stay at USA Today, moving to the Life section with the help of senior editors at the paper. While he says he disagreed with Ritter's assessment of his work, a grateful Davis says he's "very pleased with the way the paper treated me" and describes Life as a "healthier" part of the paper. (After Davis moved to Life, he received a letter from his former editors terminating him from News.)

A former paramedic, Davis started working on his EMS series while on a fellowship in 2001. His editors then freed him up for another eight months to continue on the story--no small commitment at a paper with such a thin staff.

He and many others describe the paper's operation as lean. Its editorial staff size is down slightly from the peak monthly average of 456 in 2001, but it avoided layoffs that hit many publications during the economic downturn.

"We don't have a lot of depth, in the foreign editing range in particular," cover story editor Mathews says. The lack of depth is an issue of both bodies and experience. During Mathews' years at the Los Angeles Times, a copy desk composed largely of former foreign correspondents handled world news. When she served as the paper's first Beijing correspondent, one of the copy editors was a former reporter in Hong Kong and spoke Chinese. He could help with story ideas or problems and catch mistakes. Another copy editor had spent 25 years in Latin America and knew all the generals in Argentina.

At USA Today, two editors are primarily responsible for world news, and the same group of copy editors handles all news (the Money, Life and Sports sections each have their own copy desks). "We have very good copy editors," Mathews says. "But they're young, very young. The L.A. Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal are all privileged in that way, but those are our competitors."

Five years into its third generation, USA Today remains a fundamentally national newspaper. The paper had no foreign bureaus until 1995, when Editor Mazzarella opened one in Hong Kong. It has added bureaus in London, Beijing and Brussels (the London reporter is currently on assignment in Rome). Its approach to the Middle East has been inconsistent, although editors say they plan to establish a bureau there during the next few months. The Mexico City bureau closed in 2002. There is talk of assigning a reporter in Miami to focus on Latin America, but no timetable has been set.

Lacking an extensive overseas presence, the paper dispatches reporters to parachute into hot spots during major events, as Kelley built his daredevil reputation doing. He and other roving reporters often have faced the daunting task of matching competitors based in Moscow, Jerusalem or Baghdad.

For years, Kelley satisfied his editors' desire for the paper to be different and exciting. As one reporter says, "Jack was giving them the gee-whiz, holy-shit stuff that they really want."

Jonathan Weisman, who spent nine of his 18 months at USA Today as an economic policy reporter before leaving for the Washington Post, felt editors tended to value what he terms "scooplets"--exclusive but often inconsequential developments.

"I felt the only way to get stories on the front page was not to be particularly analytical or thoughtful but just to find some teeny, tiny nuggets that other papers wouldn't have," Weisman says. "It got to be a little tedious." As an example, he cites a story he wrote about the Pentagon sending a team to India to consider evacuating Americans during the 2002 nuclear flare-up between India and Pakistan. Although the Pentagon was a long way from making any such decision, "it was a scoop, so we had this big, blaring headline."

But Weisman praised the paper's wide reach, cited by many staffers as central to its allure. When he was considering leaving the Baltimore Sun for USA Today in 2000, he went to Wisconsin during the presidential campaign and stopped at a McDonald's in downtown Green Bay. "It was an early-morning swing shift, and there were these working-class guys, all reading USA Today," Weisman says. "In 99 percent of this country, USA Today is a better newspaper than the paper being thrown onto people's doorsteps."

Other journalists also take pride in the paper's impact and approach. Tom Kenworthy, a former Washington Post reporter in USA Today's Denver bureau, says readers perceive it as "straight down the middle." USA Today reinforces its evenhanded approach through its editorial pages, which publish an opposing view to the main editorial each day and refrain from endorsing presidential candidates.

When reporter Locy travels around the country, readers tell her they love the paper. "So USA Today has touched something and filled a need out there," she says. "That's not to be dismissed."

During USA Today's second generation, Editor Jurgensen says it lost some of its distinctive edge and began to look more like other papers. Making matters more difficult, other papers had begun to look a lot more like USA Today, copying its weather page and shorter stories and improving their color, graphics and sports coverage.

John Morton, a leading media analyst, AJR columnist and early skeptic about USA Today, describes the paper as "doing very well" from a business perspective and as publishing some "very serious" journalism. "They're right up there with the Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer and others in terms of standing in the political community and halls of power," Morton says.

But he adds that it has not achieved the status of national "institutions" such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and may never attain it. "They still have an awful lot of the McPaper-type stuff," Morton says, "a lot of light stuff that you won't find in papers like the Times and the Journal unless they're trying to be funny."

Tom Rosenstiel, who covered the paper's early years as a media writer for the Los Angeles Times, says USA Today is "now a profitable business and a recognizable brand. But their business has become harder because it probably depends more on producing a quality product and less on occupying a unique niche than it did 20 years ago."

Rosenstiel, now director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, notes USA Today's early advantages included its late deadlines, late ball scores and hometown coverage away from home--the "Across the USA" news blurbs on every state. "Those mean much less in the age of the Internet, where you could sit in an airport waiting area, go online and get all that instantly," he says.

With those competitive pressures in mind, Jurgensen and her team have focused on presentation of information. They have emphasized sophisticated graphics and photos, and sections have added new features.

Life now provides regular DVD features. Inside the section, pages about "A Better Life" offer stories on health, education and science. Life's front page often showcases celebrities, movies and television.

Some new features attempt to give readers more than the stock prices and sports scores they can readily access online. The Money section added a "Market Trends" feature each Monday that offers a three-dimensional view of the stock market. Green poles show which industry groups rose for the week, red poles show which fell.

The Sports section, which faces an explosion of competition from the Internet, ESPN and other outlets, compiles lists of players' salaries and bonuses, and readers can sift through the information on the paper's Web site. Thanks to database reporting, fans can see how golfers' strengths and weaknesses might affect their chances at particular tournament sites.

Perhaps the paper's biggest challenge, however, remains news. Tom Squitieri, a national correspondent who started at the paper in 1989, says the paper's other sections more easily defined themselves. "They busted out early and got respect as must-reads," he says. The news section gradually moved to more substantive journalism, but "we're still not a consistent newspaper."

Managing Editor Ritter rates his staff as "terrific" on big breaking stories but says the challenge is to produce excellent enterprise coverage on slower news days.

USA Today has produced some distinguished investigative work but does not publish such pieces with the regularity of other top papers. It was not conceived as a showcase for the long, multipart series that are standard investigative fare. Space in the news section is tight (largely because of restrictions imposed by the presses and the placement of advertising). The paper has made its reputation as a smart digest on the day's news, which is where its reporters tend to concentrate their efforts.

Jurgensen disbanded the enterprise department that Mazzarella created. Of four full-time reporters assigned there, only one, Peter Eisler, remains. The senior investigative reporter, Ed Pound, left in 2001 to join U.S. News & World Report.

Jurgensen says the best projects grow from beat reporting, and she wants to see projects developed from each of the paper's sections. She and other editors laud Davis' EMS series for its importance to readers, and Life Managing Editor Susan Weiss calls it "the most ambitious project to come out of my section and, frankly, pretty ambitious for the paper."

Editors also praised two 9/11-related projects. One examined who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and why. Another traced the Federal Aviation Administration's unprecedented order grounding every plane during the attacks. The narrative style of that two-part series was a creative departure for USA Today.

The paper has placed less emphasis on projects about the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill--the types of investigations that expose heartbreaking social conditions, force changes and win Pulitzer Prizes. The New York Times won a 2003 Pulitzer for investigative reporting on the abuse of mentally ill adults in state-regulated homes; the Washington Post won the year before for a series that prompted District of Columbia officials to overhaul the city's child welfare system.

USA Today has not yet added a Pulitzer to its pedigree. Former Editor Quinn used to joke that if the paper ever won the prize, it would be for "best investigative paragraph." Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, admires the paper and says it has steadily attained stature but has a hard time competing in prestige in elite journalism circles without that gold standard. He notes other papers, particularly the Philadelphia Inquirer under the leadership of Gene Roberts, enhanced their journalistic reputations with a succession of Pulitzers.

USA Today's editors say not all enterprise stories must be based on long investigations. They value "conceptual scoops" that show context and impact, such as a prescient story by reporter Jill Lawrence last November about the perceived temper problem of then-presidential hopeful Howard Dean--published more than two months before his fateful Iowa scream.

Recently recruited reporters are learning how to live within the framework of USA Today's limited space and mission. Reporter Kenworthy says he rarely attempts the quirky stories he sometimes wrote for the Washington Post, such as a front-page piece about a doctor in Oregon who shot his neighbor's cows after they persistently wandered onto his property.

Some reporters feel "we sometimes shortchange ourselves by overanalyzing what's going to have broad appeal to readers," Kenworthy says. "Some of us would like the paper to be somewhat more adventurous in its story selection."

Joan Biskupic, a former Supreme Court reporter for the Post who now covers that beat for USA Today, has found that editors' appetite and the paper's space for day-to-day court business is smaller than at other publications where she has worked. Successful policy coverage in Washington often requires sustained reporting and gradually putting information before the public, but USA Today picks its shots.

"You've got to keep thinking about how to fit in with their mission--about the journalism you want to do and the mission USA Today has," Biskupic says. "It's a challenge to find the space for stories that don't have a strong time element but are important to the overall coverage of the beat." Biskupic has sought outlets outside the paper to supplement her desire for more detailed coverage of the court. She is currently on leave writing a book about Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The challenge in USA Today's third generation will be finding the right fit--between substantive journalism and fun visuals, between new recruits who can make the paper more like its competitors and its long-standing desire for distinctiveness, between tightly formatted and edited stories and respect for reporters' expertise and instincts.

USA Today fills a newspaper niche that its current leaders, by stressing a return to the paper's roots, clearly hope to sustain. Given those aspirations, and questions about the newsroom culture and a lack of institutional confidence, it seems unlikely that USA Today will become a national paper of record or attain the aura of prestige and influence that surrounds the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But so far, the young paper has made a habit of proving skeptics wrong.