Gannett

History

After purchasing the Elmira Gazette in 1906, Frank Gannett and his associates slowly expanded their holdings, first by buying another paper in Elmira, New York, and merging the two to form the Star-Gazette, and later buying The Ithaca (New York) Journal. They then purchased two papers in Rochester, New York, and in 1923, formed Gannett Co., Inc., with holdings of six newspapers all in upstate New York. Gannett appointed Frank Tripp as the general manager of the company.

Gannett believed in the power of the press and saw the media as a force for public good. He said that newspapers had a responsibility to be honest and fair and to always fight injustice, arguing that “A newspaper's power for good is unlimited,” because “newspapers can create public opinion. There is no limit to what public opinion can do” (quoted in Newton 1999).

The company gradually expanded its holdings throughout the northeastern United States and in 1943 created Gannett National Service—now Gannett News Service—to provide the group's papers with national news coverage from Washington, D.C., as well as regional coverage from a number of news bureaus across the country. By the 1960s, Gannett had become a national rather than regional newspaper group, and in 1967 the company went public. Gannett has long been at the forefront of technology, with Frank Gannett investing in the development of the typesetter in the late 1920s and later equipping newsrooms with shortwave radios to improve the speed of reporting from distances.

Perhaps one of the company's biggest gambles was the creation of USA Today, a national general-interest daily newspaper, in 1982, after two years of research on what readers and advertisers wanted. The new paper, originally sold out of white vending boxes designed to resemble television receivers in order to appeal to a generation raised on television, made heavy use of color and graphics and avoided page jumps for continuing stories. Critics of USA Today chided the publication for its short stories that they said gave scant attention to significant news and took to calling it “McPaper.” The paper was known for its stand-alone charts that sized up the latest trends and for its reliance on news briefs. But it had a daily circulation of 1.3 million by the end of 1983—it only publishes five days a week—and it ushered in design changes and the wide use of color (especially in weather pages) in newspapers across the country. Richard Perez-Pena, writing for The New York Times in September 2007, concluded that USA Today encouraged “many drab dailies to print shorter articles, switch to color, devote more space to sports and use more pictures and graphics.”

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