"Without her, USA Today would likely have failed."
-- USAT Founder Al Neuharth, describing former Publisher Cathie Black on the occasion of her appointment yesterday as chief executive of New York City's school system, the nation's largest. She led the paper for eight crucial years after the paper's 1982 launch.
I arrived the year she left. The Composing Room always heard about the staggering difficulty of luring advertisers as we pasted up full page and small b/w ads; I wish her luck with the NYC organization and kids.
ReplyDeleteTime Magazine, 2007:
...Ad revenues in Black's division, a unit of Hearst Corp., have tripled since she took over, soaring to $2.5 billion in 2006, from $841 million in 1996.
She moved fast from the start, sometimes too fast for her own good. She once left her résumé on a copy machine at work, where it was found by a senior executive at Curtis Publishing Co., Holiday's owner.
Oops.
She learned to ease up on what she thought was her firm handshake after a male colleague snapped, "Cathie, you don't need to break my hand!"
In 1979, Black made publishing history at New York magazine when she became the first female publisher of a weekly consumer magazine.
She then made a leap into newspapers in 1983, joining Al Neuharth, CEO of Gannett, and his fledgling newspaper USA Today. Like Ms., it was groundbreaking, but critics derisively called USA Today "McPaper."
It ended up revolutionizing journalism, influencing a generation of newspapers and magazines with its colorful graphics and bite-size articles designed for television watchers. Neuharth, she says, was sometimes ruthless--something she tried never to be--but she admired his strategic vision. "He always had the bigger endgame" in mind, Black says.
She would need that perspective when she arrived at Hearst. Black had already proved herself; now she would have to prove that there was still life left in the old magazine industry. "It's time to blow the dust off the curtains at Hearst!" she announced at a management conference.
And she did.
Black launched O: The Oprah Magazine in 2000, which has generated $1.3 billion in ad revenue since then and all but invented a new category, the celebrity-driven lifestyle and self-help magazine.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1680147,00.html
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