Friday, December 02, 2005

Neuharth donates papers to Library of Congress

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Al Neuharth and James Billington

The Library of Congress announced today the acquisition of the papers of Allen H. Neuharth, a visionary newspaper executive and editor who founded USA TODAY and Florida Today and built Gannett Co. into the largest newspaper company in the United States. Neuharth also founded two nonprofit organizations: the Freedom Forum and Newseum.

The announcement took place this evening in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress before an audience of more than 100, including former colleagues from Gannett, USA TODAY, the Freedom Forum and Newseum.

“It’s an honor to be in these hallowed halls where my papers will be placed with those of so many much more notable and/or interesting personalities — from presidents and other distinguished public servants — to mere media mortals,” Neuharth said.

Neuharth presented Librarian of Congress James H. Billington with the first three items from the collection:

The first edition of SoDak Sports. In 1952, after working in Sioux Falls, S.D., as a reporter for The Associated Press, Neuharth and Bill Porter launched a statewide weekly tabloid called SoDak Sports. It failed financially and folded within two years.

A 1969 special edition of TODAY, a newspaper launched by Neuharth in Florida in 1966. This special edition was the first newspaper microfilmed and taken to the moon; astronaut Alan Shepard carried it on board Apollo XIV on Feb. 5, 1971.

An original first issue of USA TODAY, published Sept. 15, 1982.

“Your papers will join a pantheon of other publishing greats at the Library of Congress,” Billington told Neuharth.

The Neuharth papers will join a distinguished collection in the Library’s Manuscript Division of the personal papers of other American journalistic luminaries including: Katharine Graham and her father, Eugene Meyer, both of The Washington Post; Henry Luce of Time; Joseph Pulitzer of The New York World and the Pulitzer Prize; his son Joseph Pulitzer II of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Roy Howard of Scripps-Howard Newspapers; and more than three dozen other publishers, editors and prominent journalists.

The papers, a gift from Neuharth, will include correspondence, speeches, photographs, memoranda and his own unpublished and published writings. The materials document Neuharth’s life and career.

Neuharth was born March 22, 1924, in Eureka, S.D. At age 11, he took his first job as a newspaper carrier and later as a youth worked in the composing room at the weekly Alpena (S.D.) Journal. He graduated from Alpena High School and then served as a combat infantryman in World War II, earning a Bronze Star. After the war, Neuharth attended the University of South Dakota and graduated with a journalism degree in 1950. He then took a job as a reporter for The Associated Press in Sioux Falls, S.D.

In 1952, he and Porter launched SoDak Sports. After it folded, Neuharth in 1954 took a reporting job at The Miami Herald. Over the next seven years, he was promoted from reporter through many editorial positions to assistant managing editor. In 1960, he was named assistant executive editor of the Detroit Free Press.

He joined Gannett in 1963 as general manager of its two Rochester, N.Y., newspapers, and in 1966, assumed the added role of president of Gannett Florida. There he started a new newspaper, TODAY, later renamed FLORIDA TODAY. In 1973, he was named president and chief executive officer of Gannett and chairman in 1979.

While head of Gannett, Neuharth turned a chain of small-town newspapers into a diversified billion-dollar media conglomerate. In 1982, he launched USA TODAY, the nation’s first general-interest national newspaper, which changed the appearance of newspapers, introducing short, snappy writing, widespread use of color photos, lively informational graphics, a detailed weather map and the most complete coverage of sports.

Neuharth retired from Gannett in 1989 at age 65. In 1991 he founded the Freedom Forum as the successor to the Gannett Foundation, established in 1935 by Frank E. Gannett. Today he is senior advisory chairman of the Freedom Forum, which focuses on three priorities: the Newseum, the First Amendment and newsroom diversity. The Freedom Forum, based in Arlington, Va., funds the operations of the Newseum, an interactive museum of news under construction in Washington, D.C.; the First Amendment Center; and the Diversity Institute. The First Amendment Center and the Diversity Institute are housed in the John Seigenthaler Center at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. The First Amendment Center also has offices in Arlington.

Neuharth is the author of eight books, including Free Spirit: How You Can Get the Most Out of Life at Any Age (2000) and Confessions of an S.O.B (1989), his autobiography. He writes a weekly column for USA TODAY called “Plain Talk.” He was named the most influential person in print media in the 1980s by Washington Journalism Review (now American Journalism Review). He has been chairman and president of the Newspaper Association of America and has received many awards in the profit and nonprofit sectors, including the Horatio Alger Award in 1975, and was the first male from the newspaper industry to win Women in Communications’ highest award, the Headliner.

Neuharth is married to Dr. Rachel Fornes, a Cocoa Beach, Fla., chiropractor. They have six children. Neuharth also has two children by his first marriage. Dan, a former journalist and university teacher, received his doctorate from the California Institute for Professional Psychology in San Francisco. Jan, who holds a law degree from Vanderbilt University, is president of Paper Chase Farms in Middleburg, Va., and is a trustee of the Freedom Forum and the Newseum.