Building for the future, the paper has been luring supremely talented reporters away from the likes of The Washington Post. The truth is, USA Today is both a better newspaper than it used to be, and yesterday's revolution. The paper claims a circulation of 2.2 million and is apparently turning a profit after losing hundreds of millions of dollars of the Gannett Newspaper Company's money. Attention spans and audiences are fragmenting, prompting some journalists to bellow louder and others to throw up their hands in despair. Some adaptations make sense in a busy world where people only devote 20 minutes a day to news consumption.
People are fascinating, process is boring.
People want news they can use. Drama is compelling. But what's interesting, immediately useful, and dramatic may not always be synonymous with what's important. One in three of all TIME and Newsweek covers represented a political or international figure. By 1997, a survey by the Committee of Concerned Journalists found that government and policy stories had fallen to 49 percent.