I'm old enough to remember when USA Today published its first edition. I was in journalism school at the time, and as I recall, people were treating it as some kind of harbinger of doom.
You'd have thought the sky was falling, because USA Today had the temerity to produce a newspaper made up primarily of short articles. (The paper earned the moniker McNews that way.) It used colored ink and featured splashy color photos on the front page.
As budding journalists, my fellow students and I found this shocking, disturbing even. I'm sure our professors and professional journalists were equally rattled. Boy, we had no idea what the future had in store, did we?
Now USA Today is the one scrambling to catch up and remake itself as a digital operation. How ironic is that?
Even a former USA Today reporter can spot the irony. Toni Locy states in the article, "USA Today used to be the trendsetter in the business ... Nobody had color before USA Today. Nobody had a weather map. And USA Today has lost a step in the last five or six years. So I think they’re right to try to regain the ground they’ve lost."
And if that isn't ironic enough, try a print article that says the Web is dead, which got a lot of buzz after it was posted online. Hmm.
And, even if this isn't particularly ironic, I thought it was interesting that you can buy a newspaper business for a buck these days. Especially if it's the Washington Times, I guess. (Or Newsweek???)
Got a buck? To paraphrase Charles Foster Kane, it might be fun to run a newspaper.
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