In many respects, Mr. Kramer — both an old-school newspaperman and online journalism pioneer — is the ideal publisher to lead USA Today toward a digital future. After earning a master’s degree at Harvard Business School, he started his journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and, after stints at The Trenton Times and The Washington Post, returned to The Examiner to become its executive editor.

He left The Examiner to become an entrepreneur and was early to understand that the power of the web lay in its ability to deliver immediate information. In 1997, at the advent of the first Internet boom, he started the financial news site MarketWatch for the Data Broadcasting Corporation.

Mr. Kramer found himself in the middle of dot-com mania. After CBS formed a joint venture with Data Broadcasting, he took MarketWatch public in 1999 and watched the company’s stock rise 475 percent on its first day of trading. It reached $120 a share and then plummeted to $2 — all in the first year.

He kept the company afloat despite the bursting of the tech bubble, and in 2005 Dow Jones acquired MarketWatch for more than $500 million. His share was about $20 million. After the sale, Mr. Kramer ran CBS’s digital unit before moving on to become a media investor and consultant.