USA Today at 20: the inside story; two tumultuous decades have passed since the magazine was launched, providing an open forum for the viewpoints of the nation's leaders and other experts

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1998

Where do we go from here?

The future, as always, remains an enigma. For example, as Lehrer points out, "In this age of electronics, we should re-evaluate what's happening in our industry. More and more there is the transfer of print to the computer screen. There's been a loss of intimacy as this process has progressed. Instead of taking your cozy periodical to bed or on a long flight, you squint at a computer screen. The publishing community had better be careful before it completely embraces the computer revolution. It could lose its intimacy. Sure, computers have speeded up the process of information. Everything is more instantaneous, from printing mailing labels to what's inside your publication. But are we serving the computer, or is it serving us? That's a notion I can't put aside.

"Life today, in the 1990s, is more frenetic. The roles of men and women have changed tremendously--and not always for the good. Women broke the chains that trapped them on the homefront, only to be shackled in another form by the business world. How much freedom did women really find by pursuing those ends? Are we satisfied with all the complexity we've added to our lives, or are we more downtrodden because of these changes? If there is more social revolution, if the family unit as we used to know it continues to deteriorate, then we must ask ourselves: How can a magazine gear its editorial direction to help the people involved?

"It's the nature of this publication that our special sections should put forth solutions and not just document problems that confront all of us. So you identify the problem. Then what? People expect some type of response: How to live with this problem. How to sort through and hopefully overcome this problem in our own lives. That is our editorial mission."

Although Lehrer's words were expressed 20 years ago in the premier issue's Open Letter, they still are pertinent today: "[We will provide] interesting, multidimensional observations of the American scene. The documented, in-depth sections of USA Today and the brief, informative news reports issues constitute a rare and rich editorial combination that should prove enlightening."

RELATED ARTICLE: USA TODAY's HALL OF FAME

Year in and year out, the nation's leaders in a wide range of fields have filled USA Today's pages with bylined articles, sharing their expertise with our readers. Among the most prominent have been the following (each listed with his or her position at the time the article was written): President Bill Clinton * Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole * Senators Edward Kennedy, Orrin Hatch, Sam Nunn, Jake Garn, Bill Bradley, Robert Byrd, John Glenn * Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich * House Majority Leader Dick Armey * House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt * Representative Pete Stark, Charles Rangel, Patricia Schroeder, John Conyers * Cabinet members Jack Kemp (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development), Robert Reich (Secretary of Labor), George Shultz (Secretary of State), Janet Reno (Attorney General), and Richard Riley (Secretary of Education) * Governors George Pataki (New York), John Engler (Michigan), James Thompson (Illinois), Mario Cuomo (New York), Michael Dukakis (Massachusetts) * Mayors Rudolph Giuliani (New York City), Dianne Feinstein (San Francisco), Henry Cisneros (San Antonio), Maynard Jackson (Atlanta), Federico Pena (Denver) * U.S. Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan * FBI Director Louis Freeh * CIA Director William Webster * World Bank President Robert McNamara * Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy William Bennett * U.S. Representative to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick * Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher * Singapore's Ambassador to the U.S. Tommy Koh * Canada's Ambasador to the U.S. Allan Gotlieb * Greece's Minister of Culture and Sciences Melina Mercouri * Chairman of the Board, Turner Broadcasting System, Ted Turner * CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer * Children's Television Workshop President Joan Ganz Cooney * ABC Chairman of the Board Leonard Goldenson * Washington Post Foreign Editor Karen DeYoung * U.S. News and World Report Editor Marvin Stone * "McNeil/ Lehrer NewsHour" Chief Washington Correspondent Judy Woodruff * Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller * Ford Motor Co. President Harold Poling * Mobil Oil Corp. President William Tavoulareas * Chrysler Corp. Chairman Lee Iacocca * National Urban League President John Jacob * National Alliance of Business President William Kellogg * American Association of Retired Persons Executive Director Cyril Brickfield * American Council on Science and Health Executive Director Elizabeth Whelan * Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman * John Cardinal O'Connor * Consumer advocate Ralph Nader * Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow * Attorney F. Lee Bailey * Syndicated political columnist Robert Novak * Film critic Michael Medved * Tennis champion Martina Navratilova