Is USA Today For Sale?

From John Reinan, minnpost.com:

In an era when there was no Internet and no other nationally distributed daily publications, USA Today provided a great, lively roundup of information. It was a fun read. And as it matured, it regularly ran ambitious, in-depth stories on national issues, often using computer-assisted reporting when that was a new technique.

But now, according to the Gannett Blog — a site run by former USA Today reporter Jim Hopkins — Gannett may be considering either selling USA Today or spinning it off as an independent company.

Gannett is better at making money than any other newspaper company. So even discussion of such a move tells you all you need to know about the health of its flagship property. USA Today’s circulation, which consistently averaged about 2.3 million daily during the past decade, is down more than 20 percent, to about 1.8 million. The Wall Street Journal has overtaken it as America’s largest paper.

Ad pages are down even more sharply, from 1,045 in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 680 in the fourth quarter of 2010 — a drop of 35 percent. And, according to Hopkins, USA Today’s newsroom staff has been cut by about 25 percent during that same period.

Read more here.