USA Today: The Television Show
In 1987, Gannett and producer Grant Tinker began developing a newsmagazine series for first-run syndication that attempted to bring the breezy style of USA Today to television. The result was the USA Today: The Television Show (later retitled USA Today on TV, then shortened to simply USA Today), which debuted on September 12, 1988. Correspondents on the series included Edie Magnus, Robin Young, Boyd Matson, Kenneth Walker, Dale Harimoto, Ann Abernathy, Bill Macatee and Beth Ruyak. As with the newspaper itself, the show was divided into four "sections" corresponding to the different parts of the paper – News, Money, Sports and Life.
The series was plagued by low ratings and negative reviews from critics throughout its run; the program also suffered from airing in undesirable timeslots in certain markets, including in the country's largest media market, New York City, where WCBS-TV and WNBC (the latter of which acquired the series from WCBS five months into the program's run) both placed the program in pre-dawn early morning slots. These setbacks led to the cancellation of the TV version of USA Today in November 1989 after one-and-a-half seasons; the final edition aired on January 7, 1990.
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