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