McPaer Extends It's Franchise

Four months in, Gannett's USA Today is moving on schedule

Los Angeles is the land of endless freeways and fast everything. Thus it might seem fertile territory for a newspaper that is billed by its editor as "a quick read" and that seeks an audience among frequent travelers and uprooted careerists who still care about news from home. Last week the Gannett Co.'s USA Today, the nation's first general-interest national daily, launched itself in sunny Southern California, in the midst of what its editors hoped was a nonsymbolic 1.2-in. rainstorm. The paper's $500,000-plus promotional campaign began with a party for nearly 1,000 guests at the Los Angeles Music Center featuring sushi bars, mariachi bands and, said one competing editor, "a dessert table as big as my office."

The grand sweep into Los Angeles followed similarly ballyhooed arrivals into Portland, Ore., Denver, Minneapolis and five other regional markets. By April, USA Today will have entered five additional metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Miami and New York. Though Gannett officials are closely guarding the circulation results in individual markets, they claim to have a total of more than 400,000 street-sold copies a day. That would make the paper, whose first issue appeared in Washington on Sept. 15, at least the nation's 18th largest.

USA Today's swift rise has surprised, and perhaps unnerved, some dominant regional newspapers, which have blatantly adopted some of the newcomer's selling points. The Austin American-Statesman is now splashed with color, rivaling USA Today's crisp photographs and streamlined graphics. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution imitated USA Today's national weather map, the Miami Herald its state-by-state compendium of news notes. The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune boosted sports coverage. Says Tribune Editor James Squires: "I see sports as USA Today's main draw."

Though such imitation is a form of flattery, USA Today still has few overt admirers among its competitors. Says Bruce Winters, editor of the San Fernando Valley (Calif.) Daily News: "If a computer could design a newspaper, it would be USA Today." Many in the industry call it "McPaper," in a slighting comparison to the McDonald's fast-food chain; the news briefs that predominate on more than a dozen of the paper's 40 daily pages are dismissed as "McNuggets." Says Anthony Insolia, editor of Long Island's Newsday: "I'm not sure USA Today provides a rich diet of daily journalism."

The paper offers offbeat trend stories, like a report last week that laboratories have, for financial rather than humanitarian reasons, cut back testing on animals, but most of the news in USA Today is not reported in depth. Indeed, President Reagan's State of the Union address was dismissed in four small stories, the longest of them just over 300 words; the New York Times gave the story most of three densely packed pages. Editor John Curley's once-over-lightly format has not changed much since the paper's first issue noted the assassination of Lebanese President-elect Bashir Gemayel on page 9.

Financially, it is too soon to judge USA Today. Circulation has grown far faster than Gannett's cautious projection of 200,000 by the end of 1982, but distributors concede that in some markets it has slipped as initial curiosity has died down. Most advertising has been sold at a discounted rate. Even Gannett Chairman Allen Neuharth says the paper will not make a profit until 1985. Despite USA Today's galvanizing effect on some once staid rivals, Gannett is not ready to start counting McDollars. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.