1. What opportunities in the marketing environment did Gannett seize in launching USA Today? How did the company learn about and respond to these opportunities?
Research and update the case information as much as possible with current research, and then conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis for USA Today.
Gannett noticed two trends or opportunities in the reading public and took advantage of those trends. The first one is the increasingly short attention span among a generation nurtured on television; the second is the growing hunger for more information. The newspaper’s primary mission was to provide more news to their readers in less time. They targeted the young and well-educated because he noticed that they were busy and care about …show more content…

Opportunities
1. The reason Washington post had an edge over USA Today in terms of stock prices is mainly because of Washington Post’s subsidiary Kaplan, which provides mentoring services and educational services, so may be USA Today should consider diversifying and creating a similar venture.
2. There’s an opportunity to monetize full event calendar listings that newspapers have not embraced yet. Taking the phonebook model, publications can list every event for free, but event promoters can pay more for highlights, icons or extra lines of text.
3. USA Today may have the weight to try something new. If it partners with Amazon.com and offer to send a free or discounted Kindle to paid subscribers, they could save a large amount of printing costs.
Threats
1. The readers’ move to viewing content for free online is hurting the massive print ad revenue of newspapers. As a newspaper’s target demographic grows older, the youth are not replacing them, instead choosing to frequent websites like Facebook or MySpace instead. They may get their news from blogs that are not professionally edited and verified like twitter.
2. Online advertising competitors such as Google will continue to be threats, as will new technologies that no one has envisioned yet.
3. The environmental movement and recycling culture have discouraged readers to subscribe to the newsprint editions, because readers will feel the papers are killing trees.