Where USA Today made it possible to get a little bit of important news on a lot of different topics, newspaper in general will always provide a lot of commentary on some very important items forever. Perhaps a generation of people will take with them that need to actually touch the inky broadsheet (or tabloid), but I truly believe that there will always be people who want to grab that coffee, grab that fav newspaper, get outside, breath the air and read – not browse – news and commentary.

By the way…I hope you and your family are doing great these days Matt.

USA Today also doesn’t get the credit it deserves for changing the industry.

I have only a few criticism of Gannett’s mothership. I’d like to see it publish seven days a week. I’d also like to see it break important stories more often. They sometimes seem content to let others do the legwork and then re-report it with a slightly different spin. (Very cost-effective, though. Gannett’s bottom line is the fattest in the industry.)

None of that, however, should overshadow all the good things they’ve done and still do.

They should get credit for reshaping the way the industry thinks in the same way CNN forced TV news to change even though Ted Turner’s baby was initially mocked as the Chicken Noodle Network.

USA Today’s state-by-state roundups are great as is the brevity of their writing. Sometimes less really is more. Papers such as my own Houston Chronicle think every story must be at least 20 inches or it’s under-done even though most readers only read a few paragraphs of most stories before they rush to work.

USA Today also led papers around the country (even the old gray lady, the New York Times) to use more color, and they recreated and repackaged a product that was in need of a makeover.

And let us not forget what USA Today was for the sports fan before the Internet took over.

Every Tuesday and Wednesday it published a full page of complete baseball stats. In the ’80s and early ’90s, that info was usually only found in the Sporting News and by the time you got the numbers they were old. I used to wait in the cold after midnight to get a USA Today as soon as they were delivered. It also offered the most complete basketball and football stats, and it pioneered the expanded box scores that now appear in every decent newspaper around the country. It doesn’t matter as much now that you can get instant, sortable stats on dozens of Web sites, but at the time the concept was groundbreaking and brilliant.

Gannett was also smart enough to put the paper’s name in ALL CAPS so it would pop out of copy. What a great marketing ploy. It didn’t last though. Even Gannett’s own papers, such as the Honolulu Advertiser, stopped using all caps for TODAY.

But even in that, they were ahead of the pack and trying to rethink they way they industry operated and the purpose it served.