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Many papers are deciding it does not. While cutting their investigative or foreign staffs, they are beefing up entertainment and sports coverage. Many journalists are worried that USA Today and its children will take over the world. Derided as "McPaper" when it was founded in 1982 by Gannett chairman Al Neuharth, USA Today pioneered the delivery of news in light, bright, four-color bites. The paper now has a national circulation of 1.6 million, second only to the Wall Street Journal, and has announced a jump in ad pages and revenue over last year.

While the paper's quality has improved dramatically over the years, with recent investigative reports on air bags, for instance--as its publisher, Thomas Curley, puts it, "we've had breadth; now we're trying to add depth"--USA Today is also seen as a bad influence on many big-city newsrooms. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, for example, now bans front-page stories that jump to another page, which means major news events must be covered in a paltry 150 words or so. Many papers have shifted to civic, or public, journalism, an increasingly popular but controversial editorial policy in which newspapers attempt to respond more closely to the needs and interests of the communities they cover, using focus groups and reader polls. "To the extent that public journalism weans reporters from political insiders and forces them to talk to ordinary people, it's an incredibly healthy development," says Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz. "But you can push it too far and become a player instead of a chronicler of the news." A player--or even a booster: the Miami Herald has been criticized, for instance, for running more of what Jim Mullin, editor of the New Times, a Miami weekly, calls "upbeat coverage of the joys of life in Miami."

The papers that are succeeding in these difficult times are those that have targeted an easily definable market or figured out ways to extend their brand name. USA Today, for instance, is what Kovach calls a great "second read" for the business traveler and for the many Americans displaced from their hometowns. "If you have moved from Dallas to Washington, you can't read about the Dallas Cowboys in the Washington Post," says Curley, "but you can get some of it in USA Today."

There has been a boom in ethnic papers, according to the New York Times, with some 20 journals for Russian readers and more than 60 for Vietnamese immigrants. And the San Jose Mercury News has positioned itself as the voice of Silicon Valley, a community defined not only by geography but by technology as well. The Mercury News reported a circulation increase in the past year of 1.5%.

Then, too, a number of alternative weeklies are stepping in where older papers, sensitive to charges of negativity, have let their role as community watchdog slide. New Times Publications, for instance, claims some 700,000 readers of its seven increasingly successful papers in Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Miami, San Francisco and Los Angeles. New Times's Westword kept dogged watch over the start-up problems at the Denver International Airport last year, while the dailies, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, were less critical. And the Phoenix New Times beat that city's dailies on the corruption scandals of Governor Fife Symington III.