She’s interviewed Barack Obama and George W. Bush, covered Wall Street and its movers and shakers, and traveled the globe as a White House correspondent. Right now, the person Caren Bohan is thinking about the most is scrolling through USA Today on their phone or thumbing through a print copy of the paper over breakfast.
“We put a particular focus on that connection with our audience,” says Bohan, BA’87, who became the new editor-in-chief of USA Today last September.
Known for its colourful format and mix of content from politics to pop culture to crossword puzzles, USA Today, in its print and digital forms, reaches seven million readers each day. Founded in 1982 and owned by Gannett, a New York-based holding company, the USA TODAY Network now spans more than 200 media outlets across the United States.
Bohan is quick to note that USA Today – the network’s flagship national publication – provides “unbiased” journalism that both “empowers and entertains our audience.
“Gone are the days when a newspaper shows up on somebody’s doorstep,” she says. “[Readers] have a million choices. They can go on Google. They can ask Alexa. But we want them to come to us.”
The way to do that, she says, is to provide the information readers need to live their daily lives.
“We in our business call that ‘service journalism’ – and I call that ‘public service journalism’,” says Bohan. “It’s not fluff, but it also doesn’t have to be boring. Our lives are too busy to devote time to ‘eat-your-spinach’ journalism. [Our readers] don’t want content that speaks down to them or is overly lecture-y.”
“Gone are the days when a newspaper shows up on somebody’s doorstep. [Readers] have a million choices. But we want them to come to us.”
Caren Bohan, editor-in-chief of USA Today
She points to their coverage of health and wellness, providing national updates on infectious diseases such as COVID-19, RSV, and the norovirus. She also highlights her team’s coverage of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Reporters on location used real-time SMS texting in English and Spanish as well as live blogs to communicate directly with residents in the affected areas.
“That is the essence of what journalism should be,” Bohan says. “We should be right there in the trenches with the community. That’s how you build trust.”
During the 2024 presidential campaign, a collaboration across the network’s newspapers produced “Hope in America” – profiles of voters in towns named Hope from Maine to Alaska. And this January, USA Today was granted the only print interview with Joe Biden during his final days in the White House.
After graduating from McGill in 1987 with an undergraduate degree in English literature, Bohan covered local news at a weekly paper in her home state of Massachusetts. “It was where I realized journalism was my calling,” she recalls.
She earned a master’s of journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992, and went on to spend 20 years at Reuters – first as a financial reporter and then traveling the world as a White House correspondent during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
A lead correspondent for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, Bohan was elected to the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association and served as its president from 2011 to 2012. She was managing editor for domestic policy with the National Journal in Washington, before returning to Reuters as Washington correspondent and editor for politics and the White House.
In 2018, Bohan joined USA Today as Washington editor. She was promoted to managing editor for politics in 2021 and rose to executive editor for politics in 2024.
“When you’re covering the president, you have a front-row seat to history,” she says, and she means that literally. She was in the front row of a news conference George W. Bush held with Vladimir Putin, and she asked Putin a question. But Bohan emphasizes she is not the story. “It’s not about us. It’s about asking the hard questions and giving people the facts.”
Bohan believes USA Today has a distinctive approach and tone that sets it apart. “We’re about informing people – but we’re also about joy creation.”
She mentions examples like their recent coverage of the 2024 Summer Olympics and the Golden Globes. “We know that people’s lives are enriched not only by knowledge, but also by the things that make them happy, that bring them together.”
How is USA Today covering the return of Donald Trump to the White House?
“Our north star is fact-based journalism,” says Bohan of her team. During the first Trump administration, she led the Washington coverage at USA Today. “There was drama galore,” she recalls. “We asked hard questions. His team got mad at us when they didn’t like our questions or our stories. But our north star was always about getting our readers the information they want.”
Bohan is confident her team can tackle the oncoming challenges, “because, frankly, it’s how we do things every day.” She mentions that USA Today has assigned a beat reporter to cover Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s controversial pick for U.S. health secretary “because there are a lot of debates around this country about vaccines and health issues. Where we can play a crucial role is not in the superficial aspects or the political theatre of these conversations, but the actual substance of these discussions about the flu vaccines, about Asperger’s and autism, what causes these conditions, what parents need to know.”
Though President Trump makes no secret of his antipathy towards much of the media, Bohan believes “most people on the left and the right embrace the First Amendment. From that perspective, the core of what we do has the support of this country from people of all political stripes. Do they always like how we do it? No. You can check my inbox for a flavour of how some people view journalists and coverage, on the left and the right.”
Bohan arrived at McGill, a bright-eyed 17-year-old who had never lived in a big city. She describes her four years on campus as transformative, both personally and professionally. “I was immediately surrounded by people from all over the world, from every continent.”
Living in a bilingual city with an international student body was the spark that fuelled her interest in world affairs. And the rigour of studying at McGill helped chart her course in the demanding world of journalism. She recalls receiving a comment on one of her English lit papers, praising her writing but criticizing the lack of depth in her analysis. She still thinks of that comment when giving feedback to her reporters.
McGill “opened my world,” says Bohan. “At the end of the day, what I’m trying to do as a journalist is open people’s worlds.”
