Larry Kramer ’72

Former President & Publisher

USA Today

Recently retired president and publisher of USA TODAY Larry Kramer is now a member of the Gannett Board of Directors. Prior to that, he was an adjunct professor of new media management at the Newhouse School and a media consultant. His book “C-Scape: Conquer the Factors Changing Business Today,” was published in November 2010 (HarperCollins).

Kramer was previously founder, chairman and CEO of MarketWatch Inc., which he created in 1995 and launched as an LLC with Data Broadcasting Corp. and CBS in 1997. He took it public in 1999, making three acquisitions to build the business along the way before selling the company to Dow Jones in 2005 for $528 million.

He was then the first president of CBS Digital Media, where from 2005-2008 he created a new division encompassing all new media operations for the network, including online, interactive and wireless initiatives. He introduced March Madness on Demand, put CBS TV shows on the Web and signed the first CBS content distribution partnerships with Google, Amazon, Apple iTunes, Yahoo and Verizon.

Following CBS, Kramer was a senior advisor at Polaris Venture Partners in 2008 and 2009. He served on the boards of Discovery Communications, American Media Inc., Freedom Communications, Harvard Business School Publishing, BlackArrow Inc. and Appinions Inc., as well as the Board of Trustees of Syracuse University. He is also an adviser to several early stage companies like Rain, Inc., Jib Jab, Minyanville, StreetFight and others. He is chair of the Newhouse Advisory Board.

Kramer started his career as a journalist, spending 20 years as a reporter and editor, rising to assistant managing editor of The Washington Post and executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner. He won several awards for reporting, including the National Press Club Award, The Associated Press Award for news writing and The Gerald Loeb award for business reporting. His staffs won two Pulitzer Prizes. He was a Pulitzer Prize Juror for two terms.