A fascinating S.O.B. entered the cosmic recycling bin a week ago. He will be coming around again soon. His kind never dies.
Al Neuharth, USA Today founder, and former chairman and CEO of Gannett Co. Inc. – the largest newspaper chain in the U.S. – shoved off at the age of 89 at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla.
It was a very different ending from his impoverished beginnings in a small town in South Dakota.
Upside: He never forgot where he came from and was generous to students at the University of South Dakota.
Downside: He ripped off millions of dollars from Gannett newspapers, hurting thousands of employees, which in turn affected the quality of those employees’ newspapers and, consequently, their communities.
More downsides: While he flourished in flamboyance, his newspaper chain demanded the corporatization of newsrooms, leaving them with the personality of any other cubicle culture. And, he created a national newspaper that came to represent the dumbing-down of media.
“Newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love to read writing,” Garrison Keillor said of America’s post-USA Today world. That, too, was part of Neuharth’s legacy.
I worked for Gannett newspapers for about 16 years, during a portion of Neuharth’s tenure. “Uncle Al” some called him. Or “Big Al.” He loved fame, wealth and power. Who wouldn’t?
Well, fortunately for Al, quite a few us found other things to love in journalism.
Some of us liked living in one community for a while and learning how it worked, acquiring knowledge and historic context on a particular beat, enjoying the challenge of trying to inform the public about what was going on in their city, even when they would’ve preferred to remain blissfully ignorant.
Without thousands of anonymous employees – Gannettoids we were sometimes derisively called – Neuharth would have never been able to build Gannett into the largest newspaper chain.
Given the current state of newspapers, that may seem like a dubious accomplishment, but in the 20th Century it put Neuharth on a first-name basis with presidents and let him use the mainstream media as if it were his own personal Monopoly game.
In his memoir, “Confessions of an S.O.B.,” he recalled his first attraction to journalism when he discovered, as editor of the Alpena High School paper, that he could be a big shot on campus by deciding whose name got in the paper and what was said about them.
“I was a media mini-mogul in the making,” he wrote. (Throughout his memoir, Neuharth is like a felon who gleefully announces his guilt and thinks that by doing so, he merits a pass on punishment.)
Before he was out of college, Neuharth decided, “I was not interested in a nine-to-five newspaper job that I would stay in for the rest of my life. … I wanted to leapfrog the normal, dull career ladder.”
A nine-to-five newspaper job? As a reporter and city editor, I never worked one of those. I don’t know any reporters or city editors who did. While climbing a career ladder might be dull, journalism wasn’t.
Americans love underdogs, so parts of Neuharth’s life made me want to cheer for him. He got tired of the big boys like Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post looking down their noses at Gannett’s mostly small- and mid-sized newspapers. By creating a national newspaper, Neuharth forced his way into the big leagues and crashed the media elite.
But USA Today was a questionable success. When I was a bureau chief at a then-Gannett-owned daily in San Bernardino, Calif., I was sent to USA Today for four months to work on the rewrite desk. While I was there, I lived in a Gannett-provided apartment in Washington, D.C.’s historic Foggy Bottom neighborhood and was given a stipend. I continued to receive paychecks from The Sun in San Bernardino. Other Gannett papers were required to share their employees with USA Today under the same arrangement.
Working at USA Today was fun and in many ways easier than my regular job in San Bernardino. The stories were so short, in some cases nothing more than a few graphs.
“Write like you’re writing for TV news,” one of the editors advised me. Keep it tight and bright.
My parents in Oregon would occasionally buy a USA Today to see my stories – something they couldn’t do with the San Bernardino paper.
My mother didn’t understand USA Today’s approach to news coverage. How come you didn’t ask this, she would say, or why didn’t you ask that?
But she was also from a tiny town in South Dakota – Virgil – and wanted to support Neuharth. (Her alma mater used to play his Alpena Wildcats. “If you see him,” my mother said. “Tell him Virgil’s got the ball.”) My Aunt Grace thought Neuharth was cute. My Uncle Norm in Mitchell S.D., kept an eye out for my byline.
I didn’t want him to read anything I wrote. Most of the stories were barely appetizers. Readers who wanted a full meal had to go elsewhere.
In “The Making of McPaper,” Peter Prichard illustrated USA Today’s style by noting that in its first edition, it led with news of Princess Grace’s death, reducing the assassination of Lebanon’s new president to a brief.
But the nation’s newspaper caught on – as Neuharth predicted it would (or, as detractors claimed, because “McPaper” was virtually a give-away at all hotels). When I worked at USA Today, I had no trouble getting anyone to return my phone calls. Everybody had heard of USA Today. In those early years, some of the permanent news staff would practically pinch themselves: We really have hit the big-time!
After four months, I returned to the gritty world of San Bernardino where the news was rarely tight and bright. As Gannett’s flagship, USA Today set the standard for many of the papers in the chain. For a time, my paper experimented with a shorter-is-better policy. When Orange County filed bankruptcy, my editor asked all city hall reporters to review their municipal budgets in each community for any potential disasters. Keep it to eight inches, though.
Tucked into my copy of “The Making of McPaper” are old clippings from the letters page of the San Bernardino Sun: “I’m dismayed by the bite-sized articles now featured in The Sun,” wrote reader Carolyn J. Gill. “The Sun, sadly, is no longer a quality paper,” wrote another reader, Mark E. Rogers.
Before readers abandoned newspapers, newspapers abandoned readers.
Today the Internet has helped rectify this with its unlimited space. Now there’s a shortage of reporters because the ad revenue has disappeared.
Neuharth went on to retire with Gannett stock worth $5.1 million and an annual income of $300,000 for life. He was also chairman of the Gannett Foundation, coordinating charitable and educational grants.
This wasn’t enough for him. Two years into retirement, he decided to sell all of the foundation’s stock – 10 percent of Gannett’s shares – to the highest bidder, thereby inviting corporate raiders. Gannett ended up buying the foundation’s stock for $670 million. Neuharth renamed the foundation, Freedom Forum, and spoke grandiosely of his plans to be a leader in global philanthropy and impact the world.
Time Magazine described him as creating “a truly baronial fiefdom at a swank building across the street from the headquarters of Gannett and USA Today. Renovations for the building (carved stone staircases, suede-covered file cabinets) cost $15 million.”
He now seems irrelevant to journalism. When I was metro editor at a Washington state daily, I made a reference to Neuharth to a young reporter. She had no idea who he was.
What a pity that Neuharth didn’t use his drive and charisma to create something that could’ve really transformed America: a new corporate model.
Why do American corporations, even those run by poor kids from South Dakota, have to become playgrounds for a new 1 percent?
In his S.O.B. memoir, Neuharth invited his two ex-wives, his son and daughter to contribute chapters – report cards on him in their own words.
He didn’t extend a similar invitation to a Gannettoid. No chapter from any of the thousands of anonymous employees who helped make his dreams come true.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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