In a lot of ways, America’s favorite fast food joint
and the country’s largest newspaper have a lot in common. You know both are bad
for you, but you can’t resist helping yourself to a serving of each.
Both distract the masses with large colorful images (USA
Today with its unnecessary and asinine graphs and charts and McDonald’s with
its shiny, glossy images of Big Macs and fries) and both push the fine print
off to the side with USA Today keeping text to a bare minimum – don’t wanna
annoy readers with all that reading.
And as you travel this great country, you find yourself
consuming more of both than you should. Just as you can’t avoid going more than
10 miles on the highway before seeing the
golden arches, you can’t stay at a reasonably priced hotel without
waking up to an unrequested copy of Gannett’s golden goose.
With both McDonald’s and USA Today, it doesn’t matter
where you pick either one up, both are designed to taste the same no matter
where you are, both are served with that wholesome generic taste, void of any local flavor. For journalists,
there is conscious effort try to hide the evidence of consumption from both
McDonald’s (journalists can’t afford new belts) and USA Today (finding a copy
on the floor of a car is an endless sentence of ridicule).
While any self-respecting journalist might look down on
McPaper (which has the gall to trademark its name it all caps USA TODAY), a
paper that routinely gives its front page to American Idol finalists and
whoever is currently dating a Jonas Brother, those in the field hide bitter
jealousy toward a newspaper with a circulation of 2 million, even if half are
those unread copies left outside travelers’ hotel rooms.
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Topics:
mcpaper, mcpepar, usa today mcpaper
Bingo. A couple years ago I took a vacation day from the newspaper for which I write, not so I could travel and hot-tub, but to service my car. Across the street from the repair shop was a Harris-Teeter grocer. I moseyed over, grabbed a coffee, saw the USA Today kiosk and realized it’d been a while since I’d read a copy. I inserted my quarters, owned a copy and walked to the repair shop’s waiting area to digest it all. Upon my arrival I was greeted by the largest stack of complimentary USA Todays I’ve ever seen. Free coffee, too. Next door, a McD’s.
Used to play on a quizbowl team, and one of my friends used USA Today to bone up on current events questions. He described the process as “News McNuggets.”