NEW YORK — Al Neuharth, the brash and blustery media mogul who built Gannett Co. into a communications leviathan and created USA Today, for years America’s best-selling newspaper, died Friday at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89.
USA Today announced his death....
His business model, characterized by stripped-down costs and generous margins, reshaped the industry, tilting the balance between profits and public service and turning Gannett into a darling of Wall Street.
Yeah, let's celebrate one of the guys who destroyed journalism.
Mr. Neuharth’s admirers applauded him for rethinking the American newspaper and streamlining the business in a way that would make print media more nimble and competitive in the Internet age....
Except print is collapsing because its lies in the digital age. Exhibit A: me
His critics said the cost-cutting he championed was draconian and would only dumb down journalism and hasten the industry’s decline. They mocked USA Today as ‘‘McPaper’’ and said Neuharth’s editorial approach resulted in a profusion of fluff....
It did.
Mr. Neuharth relished the role of larger-than-life tycoon. Even as he squeezed newspapers to plump share prices, he lived royally, maintaining luxurious executive suites in New York and Washington and five homes around the country. He crisscrossed the world in his corporate jet and was known to ride by limousine even for just a few blocks....
Translation: he was a money junkie.
His goal was nothing less than to reinvent the American newspaper, and to a great extent he succeeded.
If you can call the destruction of an industry and failure a success.
USA Today featured brief articles, bright colors, bold graphics, and light news. Modeled on television, it sought a market of business travelers, transplants and anyone for whom six paragraphs about the Middle East was sufficient and anything less than every last sports score was not....
Yeah, I used to get for the football stats back when I cared about such things and there was no Internet.
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Also see:
"Mrs. Taubman was born in the East New York section of Brooklyn on Aug. 16, 1917. Her parents, Benjamin and Bertha, were Jewish immigrants from Russia; her father, a businessman, killed himself after the stock market crashed in 1929."
"Henry A. Prunier, 91; trainer of insurgents" by Douglas Martin | New York Times, April 21, 2013
NEW YORK — Henry A. Prunier taught Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese general who withstood the armies of France and the United States, how to throw a grenade.
The lesson came in July 1945, after Mr. Prunier and six other Americans had parachuted into a village 75 miles northwest of Hanoi on a clandestine mission to teach an elite force of 200 Viet Minh guerrillas how to use modern US weapons at their jungle camp.
The Americans — members of the Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ intelligence agency in World War II — wanted the guerrillas’ help in fighting the Japanese, who were occupying Indochina. The Viet Minh welcomed the US arms in their struggle for Vietnamese independence.
What would later become the CIA.
What is more, in inviting the Americans to his field headquarters, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh leader, could receive medical treatment for his malaria, hepatitis, and other ailments. The Americans stayed for two months, and their care may have saved his life....
Mr. Prunier, whose death, on March 17, was not widely reported at the time, lived most of his life in Worcester running his family’s masonry business....
Though a footnote in US history, the mission has been hailed in Vietnam as a golden moment of cooperation with the United States....
While the Deer Team was with the Viet Minh, the Japanese surrendered, and the Viet Minh declared Vietnam an independent nation, using language from the Declaration of Independence. Ho gave his American friends a message to forward to President Truman, asking him to support the Viet Minh against France, which had lost its colonies to Japan during the war and was fighting to take them back. Truman never replied. The United States backed France.
Some historians have said that by rejecting Ho’s overture the United States squandered an opportunity to build ties with North Vietnam that might have kept Americans out of war two decades later.
Hey, look, we had an empire to build.
The counterview is that Ho’s communist ideology would have inevitably made North Vietnam an enemy by definition....
See: Victims of Vietnam
Yeah, couldn't be avoided. That's why they needed the Gulf on Tonkin lie.
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Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
They did get them all in there, didn't they?
