When South Dakota native Allen Neuharth got his chance to pursue his passion of being a news executive, he did so on a national scale as a trailblazer—reinventing news and newsrooms in the 1970s and 1980s with a relentless zeal and madness to his method that today still leaves many people amazed.
While making money was for sure at the center of his agenda as head of Gannett Co. Inc., Neuharth aggressively promoted his broad agenda as a nontraditional media mogul, forcing his rivals and peers to think outside the box or risk being consumed by his generosity with the company’s money he used to acquire dozens of small and mid-size papers and promote affirmative action and racial and gender diversity.
Neuharth succeeded in forcing many of his rivals and peers to reinvent their newspapers with shorter stories (500 word maximum, with few exceptions), more charts, graphs, color, snappier headlines and diversity of voices. His ideas for reinventing local papers went national when he debuted USA TODAY, the capstone of his media empire and its unusual news stand boxes shaped like a small television set in contrast to most local papers.
As he was empire building and moving to reinvent the news, Neuharth embraced and exerted a passion for affirmative action and diversity in the news business that had been widely talked about since the civil rights marches of the 1960s and late decade riots in major cities, yet timidly acted upon in a big way.
In just under a decade, Neuharth had bought many of the major dailies in the South that promoted and defended racial segregation and ridded those publications of an approach to news that ignored or demeaned racial minorities. He did the same when it came to women, opening access to top jobs that in the past were rarely thought of.
He gave his top staffing aides a clear mandate, authority and the money needed to turn his talk into action. Soon, people of many ethnic and racial backgrounds—men and women—were working in the newsrooms of Gannett-owned papers and television stations, oft times stunning peers, local, state and national leaders.
