Rhetorica’s Andrew Cline has trouble with taking USA Today seriously - though he’s not trying to feel that way. It’s as simple as starting your journalism career (or just starting to seriously read a paper) during a time frame when, as he describes it, “Great newspapers at that time looked gray and dull, which my cohort mistook for a sign of seriousness.”
The point of the discussion is that there is a notion, at least by the keystrokes of Erik Wemple at the Washington City Paper, that the Jack Kelley problems didn’t grasp national attention in the way that the Jayson Blair issue did - because people don’t take USA Today seriously.
Is there an age-gap issue? Or does USA Today still sit on a lower tier than other publications? I, for one, have no problem flipping through USA Today while eating breakfast at a hotel or while in an airport. It’s set up in such a way where you can read it in a shorter amount of time and get a decent amount of news into your brain. It’s colorful and gets your attention. They are able to offer color ads in their paper (although their scheduling is kind of quirky) more regularly than a lot of newspapers, and that’s a good thing for advertisers. It’s not quite to the S-A-S (Short Attention Span) level of the free dailies given out at transit stops in metro areas, but it covers a lot. Maybe it’s just me, but I like to read the nationwide, state-by-state blurbs about news items going on everywhere. If there was an RSS feed I would subscribe to from a newspaper, ideally - this would be it. However - I don’t consider USA Today to be the paper I’d pick up immediately if I have a choice. While there isn’t an “old standby” for me, I don’t grab it first all the time.
That said, I’m definitely not in a position where I don’t take USA Today seriously because it’s colorful and uses different fonts and story styles.
