Richard Curtis‘ name comes up at just about any gathering of visual journalists, even if he’s not there. Why? He knows pretty much everyone, and he has influenced most of the best practitioners of the craft.
He was there at the beginning of USA Today in 1982, helping to invent the nation’s newspaper from the ground up. For 27 years, he’s stayed, working to develop new ways of thinking about storytelling, to discover, hire and nurture talented journalists and to help guide the paper to the highest circulation numbers in the U.S.
Curtis is retiring Thursday as Managing Editor/Design for the paper.
In a letter to friends and colleagues this week, Curtis wrote:
“I can well remember my first day at USA Today in January 1982. It was filled with so much promise and wonderment. Finally, journalists, artists, photographers and designers would get an opportunity to create the newspaper of their dreams. It was a day for which we all had dreamed.”
A co-founder of the Society for News Design, Curtis graduated from North Carolina State University in 1972. He worked previously in Baltimore as assistant managing editor of the News-American, an afternoon newspaper.
In this edited interview, Curtis talks with George Rorick, who worked for him during his early years at USA Today.
George Rorick: I remember the first time I met you, maybe in 1980 or 1981 in Oklahoma City at a conference. We were sitting there chatting, side by side, and we were both sort of describing an ideal paper.
Richard Curtis: Absolutely. What could be done differently, what could be done better, what could be more engaging and would have a higher value for readers. And I think that’s what we wound up with at USA Today.
After it launched, even as people might have criticized it, I think there were many who copied USA Today. Don’t you?
Curtis: Yes. It’s amazing how many color weather pages debuted in newspapers in late 1982 and ’83, isn’t it?
What was the circulation when we started? Zero, right?
Curtis: It was zero, yeah. A start-up.
At that time newspaper circulation around the U.S. had been falling, for how many years …?
Curtis: For a long time. And the number of daily newspapers had been declining pretty steadily, too.
So, starting from a circulation of zero back on Sept. 15, 1982, what is the circulation of USA Today now?
Curtis: I think, officially, it’s 2.3 million and change. … That’s Monday through Thursday. On Friday, we sell an extra 350,000 to 400,000 more papers than we do during the (other) weekdays.
Isn’t that amazing that the paper has done so well, with all of the criticism it had?
Curtis: Well, if you think about where the criticism came from, it was generally from other newspaper people. I don’t want to say editors specifically, but newspaper people of all stripes criticized it. I think it was because it wasn’t like theirs.
But as you’ll remember from all of the research that we did, readers universally loved it.
You have been a driving force at USA Today since the very beginning. You put together the departments, you hired the people that made it work so well — people who wanted to stay there.
Curtis: We had 13 people in our department in 1982 — and I still have six of them. Twenty-six years later, almost half of that number is still here.
I think that speaks well for the kind of person it took to take a chance on the venture at USA Today. And for the rewards that they got for doing that.
In some ways, all you really want from a job are a few things: you want to know who you work for and what’s required of you. And you want the opportunity to do what it is that you do well.
For artists and photographers, USA Today was the place, and I think in many respects, it still is.
… An opposite example of that, recently, is a major metropolitan newspaper in the U.S. that just laid off its entire art department. … Now, that doesn’t speak well to their commitment to having a well-designed newspaper that answers readers’ needs in every way possible.
Video courtesy of Karl Gude
Do you have any memorable moments that you’d like to share?
Richard: I remember the day in 1987 when Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today) got up on a desk and announced that we’d made our first profit. That was good.
I also remember a lot of the people I’ve hired here and the day that they walked into my office. When it comes right down to it, the moments you remember are the ones you’ve had with people. Talk about talent.
What’s next for you? Consulting, perhaps?
Curtis: I think there are ways for me to try to pass along to others what I’ve learned.
When I first met you, I had a lot of high hopes, but I didn’t really know how to get myself from A to B, much less from A to Z.
You gave me a lot of good ideas — the confidence you showed in me helped me more than anything. You’ve done that with so many people. Your confidence in them comes through. Of course, if we screw up, that comes through, too.
Curtis: If you’re not screwing up, George, it’s like John Force, the Funny Car driver said: If you’re not catching on fire every now and then, you’re not going fast enough. … I think the secret of having any success as a manager at all is finding the right people, hiring them and getting out of their way. Give them the opportunity to do what they do best.
What do you think is next for USA Today?
Curtis: As much investment as I have in this institution and in its people, I want it to succeed wildly. Ultimately, I think it will be the last paper standing. I think there are dire times ahead for newspapers, in general.
I love reading local newspapers. But I think their economic model is not sustainable. And I don’t think that bodes well for newspapers or for democracy.
I think without a healthy, unencumbered newspaper model to provide a watchdog role over public officials especially — it does not speak well for the future of the country. I think we have to do everything within our power to guard against that happening.
However, the business models haven’t been developed that are going to make that watchdog journalism sustainable, except on a national level.
Having worked for a national news organization all of these years, I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to shine that spotlight into the dark corners of local government from that perspective.
… I don’t think the answer is the Internet, I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s part of the solution, but it’s not the solution, for many, many reasons.
I don’t think the business model is there for the Internet — despite people saying that the growth in online advertising is doing so well. They’re charging pennies for it. And pennies will not sustain the kind of rigorous journalism that’s necessary, unless journalists are willing to work for free.
Let’s talk about visual journalism. Is it harder to do? I think it takes specialized skills to do it well.
Curtis: I agree with that. Totally different skills. I think it’s harder for “non-visually” oriented people. I hate to stereotype, but they see visual journalism as an addendum to the narrative.
Instead, I would strongly suggest that today’s readers — especially younger generations — see the narrative as the addendum and visual journalism as the core.
… And the leaders of journalism, in newspapers specifically, do not attach enough value to the resources necessary to produce that visual journalism.
If we were in charge, George, you and I would say we’ve got to go out and hire a bunch of visual reporters, because that’s the strength of visual journalism — it’s the reporting that goes on behind it.
Then, there are the artists who illustrate that reporting, or that take it and design it into a form that’s accessible to readers. The marriage of those two is the perfect situation — where you marry the visual reporter or the visual journalist with the artist or the person who illustrates or designs it.
Editors and publishers, or the people who control the decision making at newspapers specifically, won’t fund that. They think, if they’re going to hire a reporter, they want a narrative reporter. They want someone to write about Washington politics, or local politics or the sports beat.
The effort to produce a visual report isn’t measured, isn’t valued, isn’t rewarded.
You may occasionally coax a visual report out of a sports reporter, for example, to demonstrate what a new golf club will do or something. But that’s likely the only visual thing he may do throughout the whole year.
Without visual reporters, without that visual talent and experience grounded in the tenets of journalism — getting the facts straight and then figuring out how best to display them to a reading public — you’re just not going to be successful.
I think that’s why we’ve seen a sharp downturn in visual journalism. And visual journalism now is a catchall phrase for doing video on the Internet. While that’s an important part of it, it’s not the only thing.
How do you feel about visual journalism at this point in your career — and the way that technology has added new opportunities?
Curtis: I think we’re just barely tapping the capabilities of it.
Any newspaper that was started back in the 17th or 18th Century, was all narrative journalism — there wasn’t any visual journalism, and there didn’t need to be.
But now that technology enables it, we’ve discovered that people learn in different ways.
I gave a talk recently at N.C. State University on this. Some ways of communicating are much more powerful in terms of distributing information and helping people to use it for knowledge, rather than just presenting it to them as data and hoping that it is absorbed.
… Both newspapers and online are perfect vehicles for distributing information in a variety of ways.
Visual journalism isn’t just as you and I knew it 25 years ago — informational graphics. It’s become much more than that.
Alternative story forms, for example, are very powerful methods of distributing information in a way that is of high value to the reader.
Alternative forms are one way, in this very time-pressed world that we live in, to help people be very selective about what they read and still gain an appreciable amount of knowledge from it that they can put to use.
An example I used at N.C. State was the system of interstate highway signs. The system has a clear logic behind it. That logic and symbolism is knowable on a subconscious level, for the most part.
Once you understand the logic behind it, it makes so much sense — and you think, “How brilliant was that for someone to design this complete signage system for interstate highways that helps you navigate?”
Light bulbs went off in the audience, when I mentioned this, and these were highly educated people and people who had been traveling around on interstate highways for years.
People just don’t always recognize the power of visuals.
Curtis: No. Visuals are effective ways to communicate for many different reasons. They’re effective across all age groups — especially effective for young people, because they’ve been brought up in a much more powerfully visual world than people of your generation and my generation — certainly more than our parents, who just had no exposure to visual communication in the way that our children and our grandchildren have and will have.
So, I think there is a very powerful future for visual journalism.
You’ve inspired so many people, Richard. You opened the door.
Curtis: Maybe I held the door open for you and you just fell through, George.
