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Comment by JSR_FDED | Hacker News Reader

I lived in the US many years ago. USA Today was then already a bit of a joke - always a color pie chart on the front page, ludicrously generic news and sports, and on the last page 1 paragraph of news per state for an entire state (if something newsworthy happened according to the editor I guess). Let’s just say very much not a highbrow paper.

I visited the US again last year and got the USA Today in my hotel. I thought I was being pranked. The writing, tone, complexity had all plummeted to the level of a child. That paper is basically for people who can’t figure out how to get their news from Yahoo. The Same people who get value from TV Guide.

Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.

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USA Today also owns a huge number of local papers -- possibly most. The main local papers in the three last places I've lived (Austin TX, South Bend IN, Asheville NC area) were all USA Today Co.-owned. (Used to be called Gannett.)

It's not dying. Or, at least, it's doing better than anyone else.

My local USA Today-owned paper moved from a giant historic building (800 people when I worked there), to a new much smaller office (about 150 people at that point), to announcing they're moving to a coworking space.

They're dying, it's just a slow bleed-out.

I decided to spot check a few, including places like Portland and Seattle, and it seems like private ownership by a family for the last century is pretty common. And isn't the main paper in Austin the Austin American-Statesman? That's the Hearst family. Though looking a little deeper, they were owned by Gannett until last year.

Yes for big cities, but there are very very few independent local papers in less populated areas, for example: https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/with-a-new-media-conglo...

Also the Oregonian (big Portland paper) and the Seattle Times (big Seattle paper) are not locally owned anymore.

It’s interesting. Growing up, my small town of ~4000 had a local newspaper. It doesn’t exist anymore, as of 5-10 years ago. I think many less populated areas did have some independent journalism until very recently.

But at the same time there is also an online newsletter/blog/sort of newspaper that started maybe 15-20 years ago. It has maybe one or two employees but it’s mostly about high school sports and local events.

The Seattle Times is still owned by the Blethen family (who have owned it since 1896).

Ah confused it with the Tacoma News Tribune

> Let me guess what Palantir will tell them: your audience is dying and/or illiterate. Add cartoons. You’re welcome.

And USA Today will be billed $50M for the privilege.

Stories/comments like these make me want to dedollarise.

Jokes aside, I do honestly wonder what they expect to learn from this kind of analysis.

For the newspaper: elderly people staying in 2 and 3 star hotels eating their free continental breakfast.

For their website: slightly younger elderly people on their ipada eating breakfast at home.

USA Today, feel free to contact me for payment details

Hey now, maybe they can finally figure out how many people get pissed off when they click on the left side of a page when they pull it up to get window focus to scroll and have the entire page navigate off back to the main USA Today homepage instead of whatever puff piece story they got linked to.

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