Title Text

Al Neuharth

Winning is
the most important thing in life

Background

Background

The Beginning

Let's start a national newspaper!

Problems

Money

Tapping the market

Logistics

Opportunity

Gannett
 

• Booming newspaper chain
• 81 papers around the country
• 4,000 reporters and editors
• Sold more than 3.6 million papers a day

Opportunity

NEUHARTH

The Journey: Step I

CAPTURE YOUNG GENIUSES

The Journey: Step I

Larry Sackett

 Tom Curley

Frank Vega

Paul Kessinger
 

Below 31 years of age

Different area of expertise

The Journey: Step I

Could Gannett publish and print a national newspaper?
 

Could they distribute and sell it?
 

Could they design something unique?

Would advertisers “get it”?

The Journey: Step II

CREATE A CONCEPT

The Journey: Step II

The Journey: Step III

WOULD THERE BE ANY ADVERTISERS FOR A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER?

The Journey: Step III

Haha.

No.

The Journey: Step III

Advertise for us?

Only if you print in colour

The Journey: Step IV

DID GANNETT  HAVE ENOUGH OFFSET PRESSES TO PRINT USA TODAY IN COLOUR? 

The Journey: Step IV

Fixing or buying new printing presses?

YES
 

Training people to use them?

YES

Buying expensive color dye ?

YES

CHUCK BLEVINS

Commercial Viability

full years before USA Today would be profitable

based on:
on revenues of $250 million a year and circulation of more than 2 million

5

The Launch

Summer 1982

First Issue sold out

Called an overnight sensation

The Launch

"...a testimony to the kind of dreams
free men and women can dream and turn into reality here
in America."

- President Ronald Reagan

What can we learn from them?

Persistence

"Like most dreams or
visions, the notion of a new national newspaper didn’t appear
full-blown all at once. But once it got inside my head, it
wouldn’t go away. For more than ten years, it was coddled inside
me.”

Risk-bearing Ability

"Anybody who is
going to do this is going to feel that they have had the
chance of a lifetime. We are going to expect that people will
regard it as that and bust their tails and gamble on the longterm
returns to them. And if we score, it will be very big.”

First-mover's Advantage

A key aim of everything they did was to be different,
to distinguish this paper from the rest.

It had to be
snazzy, new, distinctive.

Thank you!

Aayushi Anand

Shreya Khurana

Shubham Goel