David Mazzarella, editor who helped reshape USA Today, dies at 87

Boston Globe

16 hours ago

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 air bags in automobile collisions; and the Ford Motor Co.'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.
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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.
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'We're not denying our past,' 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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Rob Norton, an assistant managing editor of Fortune magazine, told The New York Times in 1996: 'I don't associate USA Today automatically with investigative journalism, and when I looked at that piece on air bags, I was impressed with the amount of work that went into it. It was the kind of piece that could easily have appeared in the Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal.'
At daily meetings that determined which articles would find a place on the next day's front page, Mr. Mazzarella calmly and precisely pressed reporters and editors.
'He was totally willing to ask, after a lot of work had gone into an article, 'Why is this a story?' 'What will this mean to somebody?' 'How will this connect to readers?'' Susan Goldberg, a former assistant managing editor, recalled in an interview.
Goldberg, now the president of GBH, the Boston public media company, added, 'Those meetings were slightly terrifying but incredibly educational.'
Doug Levy, a former investigative reporter for USA Today, said his answers to Mr. Mazzarella's pointed questions led to many of his pieces, often about the tobacco industry, landing on the front page.
'He completely embraced the culture of investigative journalism,' Levy said in an interview.
Mr. Mazzarella's push to make USA Today a more serious, news-driven publication during his tenure as editor-in-chief was praised by the American Journalism Review in 1997. 'It is striving for depth, for original reporting and for enterprise,' the magazine wrote, 'It is not just a success, it is rising to respectability.'
Tom Curley, a former president and publisher of USA Today, said that the paper's main conference room at its former headquarters in Rosslyn, Va., displayed front pages with circulation data above them. But more than raising single-copy sales, the journalism that Mr. Mazzarella's staff produced resonated with advertisers.
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'By being too light early on, we didn't have credibility with advertisers,' he said in an interview. 'We had to earn our way into the advertising conversation.'
He added, 'David really ushered in that era. He was transformational.'
By the mid-1990s, USA Today's circulation was around 2 million; more than half were in newsstand sales, the rest in home delivery or purchased in bulk for free distribution by hotels and airlines.
Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, said USA Today had 'continued to take on more serious journalism' since Mr. Mazzarella retired in 1999 and had moved beyond being the 'Rodney Dangerfield of American newspapers,' forever searching for respect.
He cited the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism it shared in 2018 with The Arizona Republic for a multimedia series on the building of the border wall between the United States and Mexico.
Tullio Peter David Mazzarella was born on June 29, 1938, in Newark, N.J, and grew up in South Orange, N.J. His parents were immigrants from the southern Italian village of Mirabella Eclano. His father, Pasquale, was a tailor. His mother, Benigna (Preziosi) Mazzarella, was a seamstress whose long life and cooking inspired him to write 'Always Eat the Hard Crust of the Bread: Recollections and Recipes From My Centenarian Mother' (2012).
At Rutgers University, he was drawn to journalism by assignments for the school newspaper, The Daily Targum. As a sophomore, he was suspended for an academic year for cutting too many classes and, at the suggestion of a journalism professor, found work as a reporter at the weekly Cape May County Gazette. After returning to Rutgers, he became the editor-in-chief of The Targum. He majored in political science and graduated in 1962 with a bachelor's degree.
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He joined the Associated Press's Newark bureau that year and was later based in Rome and Lisbon, Portugal. In 1969, he covered the civil war between Nigeria and Biafra, its secessionist state.
In 1971, he left the AP to edit The Rome Daily American, an English-language daily in Italy. He was hired by Gannett in 1976 as the foreign news editor of its news service in Washington and then spent two years as the editor of The Courier-News, a Gannett paper in central New Jersey, before being named publisher in 1979.
In 1983, shortly after USA Today began publication, Mr. Mazzarella was named general manager for the New York metropolitan area, in charge of trying to raise the paper's subpar sales. He had a daunting job. The paper's ubiquitous street vending machines were being vandalized; in the summer of 1983, about 1,000 of them were destroyed or damaged, some with M-80 firecrackers, in New York and Philadelphia.
Mr. Mazzarella's solution was to replace the machines as quickly as possible and concentrate them in safer tourist areas. Circulation perked up and, over the next decade, he served as president of USA Today's international operations.
After leaving USA Today in 1999, Mr. Mazzarella spent about a decade working for Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, variously as its ombudsman and editorial director.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1999, Mr. Mazzarella is survived by his daughters, Laura Mazzarella, Lilianna, and Julie Geredien, from his marriage to Kitty Uksti, which ended in divorce; and two grandchildren. His son, Tullio David, died of a brain tumor in 1969 at 21 months old.
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While Mr. Mazzarella was single-mindedly devoted to hard news, he was not nearly as interested in some of the people and events in the wider culture that fascinated the paper-buying public.
'Dave was such a serious newsman, but he didn't have any feel for pop culture or softer stories,' Tom McNamara, a USA Today managing editor of investigations and enterprise under Mr. Mazzarella, said in an interview. 'It was always amazing to him that people would be interested in Madonna or the O.J. Simpson trial. But one good thing about him is he knew his blind spots and would listen to his editors and reporters who would say, 'No, this is a good story, people are interested in this.''
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