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Usa Today At 25

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by Kevin Maney
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Sep 10 2007 12:00am EDT

USA Today at 25

My old haunt, USA Today, turns 25 in a week. (I was there for 22 of those years.) It's amazing to remember that the paper was born from the same technology that gave us CNN about the same time: satellite communications. Lots of other factors came together, of course, but the satellites made the whole thing work. The pages of USA Today could be beamed to printing plants around the country, so the papers could be printed and trucked to every city within hours. The technology, as much as Al Neuharth's original thinking, broke newspapers out of having to be created, manufactured and distributed locally.

USA Today was a disruptor in news back then. Now here we are 25 years later, and it's lumped in with the other traditional mainstream media as they all fight to avoid being disrupted themselves by Yahoo, blogs, Facebook or who knows what else. By comparison to a lot of mainstream media, USA Today is giving it an aggresive go, but it's hard to say whether it's working.

usat%20front.jpg. □

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