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Boston Globe
18 hours ago
- Boston Globe
David Mazzarella, editor who helped reshape USA Today, dies at 87
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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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. Advertisement '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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.'' This article originally appeared in
Harvard Business Review
a day ago
- Harvard Business Review
Early Adopters of Gen AI in Hong Kong Light the Way to Broader Implementation
Download the Report The advent of generative AI (gen AI) marked a watershed moment in the global business landscape. It's arguable whether any recent technological development has garnered so much attention so quickly, and businesses around the world lost no time experimenting with potential use cases and piloting. Early adopters of gen AI are deriving positive business outcomes from established use cases. In November 2024, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services conducted a survey of 682 members of the Harvard Business Review global audience who are familiar with their organization's current state regarding the use of gen AI and decisions about it.
Forbes
a day ago
- Forbes
Why Real Leaders Don't Rush: The Hidden Power Of Presence
"Active pauses" are celebrated in strategic decision-making amid uncertainty, showing that leaders who deliberately slow down often make better choices than those who rush to action. The difference? What I call 'robust presence' – a concept that builds on this 'active pause,' as described in HBR, but goes deeper. This isn't about disconnecting or stepping back from the action. It's about becoming so present that you're actually more connected to the people and dynamics around you. Like horses in the wild – they're not meditating in a zen bubble. They're hyper-attuned to their environment, reading every signal, sensing every shift in energy. Their stillness is engaged, aware, strategic. In a culture that rewards instant responses and celebrates "bias toward action," the most effective leaders I've worked with over the past decade aren't the ones who speak first or move fastest. They're the ones who can access this kind of robust presence – and it might be the most underutilized leadership skill in the modern workplace. Why My Toughest Executive Coaches Don't Speak at All As a certified EQUUS facilitator, I have delivered equine-assisted learning sessions for a wide range of humans, from Fortune 500 C-suite leaders to small business owners in growth mode to founders and frontline hospitality professionals preparing for retirement. Why horses? They're prey animals whose survival depends on reading authentic presence. They don't respond to your title, your confidence, or your charisma. They respond to congruence: when your internal state matches your external signals. When a Fortune 500 CEO steps into the arena buzzing with anxious energy – even while speaking calmly and smiling – the horse won't engage. They wait. Watch. Feel for something real. Only when the leader drops into genuine presence – aligned, grounded, and attuned – do the horses move toward them. It's a 1,200-pound feedback system that cuts through posturing and performance to reveal actual leadership Neuroscience of Strategic Stillness Dr. Daniel Siegel's research at UCLA reveals why presence matters so much for leadership effectiveness. When we're reactive (rushing between meetings, responding from stress) we operate primarily from the amygdala, our brain's alarm system. This triggers fight-or-flight responses that narrow our cognitive range and limit creative problem-solving. But when we practice what Siegel calls 'mindful awareness,' what I call robust presence, we activate the prefrontal cortex. This region governs executive function: strategic thinking, emotional regulation, empathy, and complex decision-making. Research shows that leaders who develop mindfulness practices demonstrate measurably improved strategic thinking and emotional regulation. The business case is clear: presence isn't the opposite of productivity. It's the prerequisite for meaningful progress. Three Tools for Building Presence Under Pressure Presence isn't something you're born with. It's a learnable skill. Here are three techniques I teach executives to strengthen their capacity for strategic stillness: Noise Cancellation: Before important decisions, do a mental audit. What background tabs are running in your mind? Unspoken team conflicts, personal stress, overcommitments? Name them specifically. One client discovered she was carrying worry about her teenage daughter's college admissiosn process into every meeting, diluting her focus. Simply acknowledging this pattern helped her compartmentalize more effectively. Reflex Rituals: Create micro-pauses before automatic responses. When someone asks for a decision, take three conscious breaths before answering. Ask yourself: "Am I responding from habit, pressure, or actual alignment with our goals?" This simple practice helped one tech CEO break his "knee-jerk yes" habit, dramatically improving his team's project quality, and controlling costs. Somatic Grounding: Presence isn't just mental – it's physical. Use your body as an early warning system. Tight shoulders often signal overwhelm. Shallow breathing indicates stress. A clenched jaw suggests you're holding back something that needs to be said. One pharmaceutical executive I worked with learned to recognize his 'decision fatigue posture': slumped shoulders, clenched jaw, downcast eyes, and a telltale restlessness in his hands. When he saw himself in that state, he committed to taking a 5-minute walk before making any more Competitive Advantage of Slowing Down I recently worked with an executive who came to her sabbatical more burned out than when she was leading full-time. She'd created a 12-point plan for her "rest period"—language learning, parenting goals, personal brand strategy. When she entered the arena, the horse refused to engage with her frantic energy. Only after she admitted the pressure she felt to perform even in rest did the horse approach and rest its head on her shoulder. "That," she said, "was the first real breath I've taken in months." Six months later, she returned to work with a different leadership style. Instead of managing through urgency, she led through clarity. One team member pulled her aside after a big launch and said, 'I don't know what changed, but it feels like we can breathe again.' And they could… because she finally was. The ROI of Robust Presence When leaders reclaim presence, they don't just avoid costly mistakes – they unlock capacity for breakthrough thinking. Their teams feel psychologically safer. Their decisions reflect wisdom, not just speed. In our acceleration-obsessed culture, robust presence is a quiet competitive advantage. The leaders who master it don't just move fast. They move right. And that protects time, energy, and trust that can be wasted when decisions have to be reversed down the road. The question isn't whether you can afford to slow down. It's whether you can afford not to. What would change in your leadership if you got robustly present before your next big decision? Take our brief Subtract to Succeed diagnostic to identify your biggest energy drain and discover your natural skill, whether presence or one of the other two.
