In February 1980 Neuharth met with members of a task force to discuss his vision for unique nationally distributed daily newspaper.
By early 1982, a team of news, advertising and production personnel from Gannet’s daily newspaper had developed and printed three different prototypes, which were sent to nearly 5,000 professional people.
After receiving a positive response, Gannet’s board of directors unanimously approved the paper’s launch. The newspaper was launched on September 15, 1982; with 155,000 copies of the first edition of USA Today hit the newsstands. It was revealing a new and noticeable design deviation.
Along with the compacting of stories by using a tight writing style, USA Today included a bright and colourful display filled with photograph, maps, charts, graphs and other such informational graphics. Barely a month after its debut, USA Today’s circulation hit 363,879 double the original year-end projection, and topped the 1 million mark just seven months after its introduction.
By the end of its third year, USA Today had become the second largest paper in the country, with a circulation topped only by The Wall Street Journal.
To stay ahead of the imitative competition, USA Today decided t become a more serious newspaper with improved journalism. The shift from primarily soft news to hard news began with the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. By 1991, editors begin focus much more sharply on hard news rather than soft news.
The first major redesign in USA Today’s history occurred in 2000 as the paper move from a 54 inch to a 50 inch width. The goal of the redesign was to make the paper easier to read and cleaner in design.
USA Today
