| Hello again. |
| Well, we're near the end of our unit on newspapers. |
| I'm going to talk about our national paper, USA Today. |
| Some of you might recognize it as the topic of this week's reading assignment. |
| US... USA Today is now more than 25 years old. |
| When it began, few expected it would last this long. |
| Well, not only has it lasted, it has thrived. |
| USA Today is the largest-selling daily newspaper in America. |
| It is also distributed in many countries around the world. |
| But that's only part of the story. |
| The real success of USA Today is the way it changed the newspaper industry. |
| USA Today changed the way papers look. |
| It changed the way reporters write. |
| And it changed the way papers gather and deliver news. |
| USA Today set out to be different. |
| Newspapers at that time were, um, in trouble. |
| Fewer people were reading them. |
| The papers were full of bad news about crime and killing. |
| They had long stories. |
| They didn't have color photos and graphics |
| and many could not include the latest sports scores. |
| USA Today changed all that. |
| It had shorter stories, |
| most of which did not jump, or continue, from one page to another. |
| It used color photos, and colorful charts and graphics. |
| It did not have much international news, |
| but it did have lots of sports, entertainment and human-interest stories. |
| It was trying to appeal to younger readers. |
| These readers had been raised watching television, |
| so they had trouble, uh, paying attention to longer stories. |
| They wanted, erm, to be entertained, not informed. |
| At first, many people laughed at USA Today. |
| Other newspapers called it "McPaper". |
| They were comparing it to McDonald's fast food, which isn't, um, very healthy. |
| It fills you up, but it doesn't have much nutrition. |
| They said McPaper was the same way, |
| it looked good, but the news it had wasn't very important. |
| People said USA Today "dumbed down" the news. |
| Does anyone know what "dumb down" means? |
| Yeah, I think it means to make things too simple. |
| Like, you want to make it easy to understand, but you make it too easy. |
| So it's like writing for a little child. |
| That's exactly right. |
| If you make something too simple, people get mad. |
| They think that the writer thinks they're stupid. |
| But a funny thing happened. |
| More and more people started reading USA Today. |
| About a year after it started, it had a circulation of more than one million. |
| Today, its circulation is past two million. |
| Question? |
| Yo, what does circulation mean? |
| Circulation is the number of papers that are read each day. |
| It means that USA Today distributes more than two million copies of each issue. |
| When other papers saw the circulation grow, they became worried. |
| So, they started to, uh, copy USA Today's style. |
| Their stories got shorter, and they started using lots of color photos and charts. |
| They replaced quote unquote serious news with feature stories. |
| Soon, it became normal for newspapers to look like USA Today. |
| But it wasn't only appearance that made USA Today so popular. |
| One very big reason for its success was timeliness. |
| Timeliness means its ability to report the latest news. |
| Daily newspapers have a deadline, |
| which is the time they have to stop writing and start printing the paper. |
| The deadline often caused papers to leave out news. |
| This was especially true of East Coast papers and, erm, West Coast sports scores. |
| Basketball, football and baseball games would end on the West Coast at 11 p.m. |
| But that's 2 p.m Eastern time. |
| This was too late to put the score of the game in the next day's paper. |
| USA Today, however, used satellites to transmit news. |
| It could set later deadlines, so it could include the West Coast scores. |
| This, alone, caused many people to buy the paper. |
| Yes? |
| But today most papers use satellites. |
| So why has USA Today's circulation kept growing? |
| Excellent question. |
| Uh, actually, USA Today has changed. |
| It still looks colorful, but it's started to become more like traditional papers. |
| Its stories are getting longer, and it has more international news. |
| It changed because people are changing. |
| The paper needed to appeal to more, um, educated readers, |
| because they're the ones with money. |
| Also, it needed to sell more papers overseas. |
| International readers don't want "dumbed down" news. |