It’s hard to resist a joke about USA Today‘s bite-sized news becoming byte-sized, but I will anyway. USA Today, the nation’s top-selling newspaper, is combining print news, text messaging, mobile advertising and mobile search.
Users signing up to USA Today‘s text alerts for news, sports, gossip, etc. will receive real-time updates and a sponsored interactive ad. Short codes appear daily in the print edition of the paper. Matt Jones, director of mobile strategy and operations at Gannett Digital (Gannett owns USA Today), said the service “allows us to take a non-interactive platform, a newspaper, and make the print product interactive.”