Joel Sucherman, Director of Product Innovation at USA Today, was kind enough to speak to George Mason University students on Tuesday about the future of print and multimedia news and how USA Today is dealing with it.

Sucherman identified two major changes in current journalism:

- Publishing no longer requires a huge investment, and consumers are gravitating toward informal internet sources for their news

- Fewer people are reading print, resulting in reduced circulation and decreased financial resources

The future of journalism is centered around the internet, but USA Today was originally apprehensive about a "web first" approach to news writing. Reporters worried the paper would "scoop itself" by publishing timely web articles that might allow competitors in on the story before they went to print.

USA Today got over this initial apprehension and embraced a policy of cooperating with other online news sources. The best way to keep readers coming back was to give them what they wanted. "Sending people away from USA Today didn't mean sending them away forever," said Sucherman. The USA Today website guides readers to whoever has a specific story rather than ignoring these sources just to keep readers on the site.

Sucherman went on to highlight a couple of parts of the USA Today site, including Pop Candy, a pop-culture blog written by Whitney Matheson with thousands of readers and a real sense of community. He also referred to the Candidate Match Game, a unique application that quizzes users on their opinions of national policy, and allows them to watch as each answer advances a presidential candidate in a "horse race" until one emerges victorious as the closest match to said user's opinions.

With all this emphasis on internet and multimedia functionality, sometimes it seems like print media as we know it might be living its last days. However, Sucherman does not believe print newspapers will die out completely, but instead will start to look more like magazines, providing analysis rather than breaking the stories. But if paper does dissappear, according to Sucherman, the information that used to be in print is likely to move to iPods and cell phones - "Things we already carry around."