For reasons passing understanding, national newspaper USA Today has launched its own iPhone travel app. The USA Today AutoPilot boasts TripIt integration, real-time flight stats, and various city-specific directories.

Ignore for a minute that most of this app's TripIt and weather features are already offered natively by, um, the TripIt iPhone app. Ignore also that there are great city-specific guides for tourists and that if you're turning to USA Today you might not be getting the most nuanced suggestions. The bigger question is: why? Who at USA Today woke up and thought "you know what we need to solidify our brand? An iPhone travel app."

As it turns out, USA Today actually provided reporters with an answer to that question:]]> Omri 2009-10-16T09:18:38-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/9/12/163129/590

When I graduated from college back in (gulp) 1992, I packed my bags and moved to Riga, Latvia (pictured) to work at an English-language newspaper called The Baltic Observer. The Observer was an ambitious young paper launched by a handful of Latvian-Americans, Latvian-Canadians, and Latvian-Latvians a year earlier, and I was proud to be a part of it, chasing down stories about politicians, dissidents, and anybody doing anything interesting in the three Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. ]]> Victor Ozols 2009-09-12T16:31:29-05:00 http://www.jaunted.com/story/2009/4/4/124058/6799

You know how whenever you stay in a big chain hotel, you get a copy of USA Today delivered to your door every day? Well, it turns out that hotel distribution is a huge part of USA Today's circulation, and the slowdown in business and leisure travel is really taking a toll on the Gannett behemoth's bottom line. The Wall Street Journal points out that the newspaper has seen a 7% decrease in the number of copies distributed through hotel chains such as Marriott, which is seen contributing to a 35% dip in ad revenue in the first quarter. In a statistic that I found quite surprising, the Journal notes that the 1.3 million daily copies of USA Today distributed at hotels last year accounted for more than half the paper's average weekday circulation. ]]> Victor Ozols 2009-04-04T12:40:58-05:00 Search Jaunted string http://www.jaunted.com/search/