David Mazzarella, Editor Who Helped Reshape USA Today, Dies at 87

New York Times

2 days ago

David Mazzarella, who as the top editor of USA Today in the 1990s sharpened the colorful broadsheet newspaper's focus on hard news, including the establishment of a unit that produced investigative and enterprise journalism, died on July 17 in Falls Church, Va. He was 87.
His wife, Christine Wells, said that he died at a rehabilitation center from complications of a fall.
A former foreign and war correspondent for The Associated Press who rose through the ranks of USA Today's parent company, Gannett, Mr. Mazzarella was named editor in chief in 1994 and pushed the USA Today staff to produce newsy scoops and strongly reported investigations that readers couldn't get anywhere else.
He added bureaus in Hong Kong and London as well as Denver, Atlanta and Boston. And he created an enterprise department that produced series about airline pilots who evaded licensing safeguards; children who were killed by airbags in automobile collisions; and the Ford Motor Company's problems with faulty ignition switches, which led to a recall. Under Mr. Mazzarella's watch, USA Today ran a multipart series that investigated arson fires at Southern churches.
He was credited with accelerating an effort to feature more substantial journalism that had begun under his predecessor, Peter S. Prichard, and to shift away somewhat from USA Today's earlier reputation for breezy bite-sized stories ('Men, Women: We're Still Different,' one headline said) that earned it the nickname McPaper.
'We're not denying our past,' Mr. Mazzarella told The Washington Post in 1997. 'It's still our intention to keep providing news that's easy to read, in small bites. But we want to add to that an element of depth that makes the news more understandable to our readers.'
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