In the main edition of the paper circulated in the United States and
Canada, each edition consists of four sections: News (the "front page" section), Money, Sports, and Life. Since March 1998, the Friday edition of Life has been split into two sections: the regular Life focusing on entertainment (subtitled
Weekend; section E), which features television reviews and
listings, a
DVD column,
film reviews and trends, and a travel supplement called
Destinations & Diversions (section D). The international edition of the paper features two sections: News and Money in one, and Sports and Life in the other. The paper does not print on Saturdays and Sundays; the Friday edition serves as the weekend edition.
USA Today has published special Saturday and Sunday editions in the past: the first issue released during the standard calendar weekend was published on January 19, 1991, when it released a Saturday "Extra" edition updating coverage of the
Gulf War from the previous day; the paper published special seven-day-a-week editions for the first time on July 19, 1996, when it published special editions for exclusive distribution in the host city of
Atlanta and surrounding areas for the two-week duration of the
1996 Summer Olympics. Orange is used for bonus sections (sections E+), which are published occasionally for
business travel trends and the
Olympics. Other bonus sections for sports (such as for the
PGA Tour preview,
NCAA basketball tournaments,
Memorial Day auto races (
Indianapolis 500 and
Coca-Cola 600),
NFL opening weekend and the
Super Bowl) previously used the orange color, but later changed to the regular sports red in their sports bonus sections. To strengthen their association with
USA Today, Gannett incorporated the
USA Today color scheme into a standardized broadcast graphics package that was phased in across its television station group (which was spun off in July 2015 into the separate broadcast and digital media company
Tegna) starting in late 2012. The package used the color scheme in a rundown graphic on most stations, persisting throughout their newscasts, as well as bumpers for individual story topics. Unlike other papers, the left-hand quarter of each section are "reefers" (front-page paragraphs
referring to stories on inside pages), sometimes using sentence-length
blurbs to describe stories inside. The lead reefer is the cover page feature "Newsline", which shows summarized descriptions of headline stories featured in all four main sections and any special sections. As a national newspaper,
USA Today cannot focus on the weather for any one city. Therefore, the entire back page of the News section is used for weather maps of the
continental United States,
Puerto Rico and the
U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as temperature lists for many cities throughout the U.S. and the world. Temperatures for individual cities on the primary forecast map and temperature lists are suffixed with a one- or two-letter code, such as "t" for
thunderstorms, referencing the expected weather conditions. The colorized forecast map was created by staff designer George Rorick (who left
USA Today for a similar position at
The Detroit News in 1986) and was copied by newspapers around the world, breaking from the traditional style of monochrome contouring or simplistic text to denote temperature ranges. National precipitation maps for the next three days (the next five days before the 2012 redesign) and four-day forecasts and
air quality indexes for 36 major U.S. cities (16 cities prior to 1999), with individual cities color-coded by the temperature contour corresponding to the given area on the forecast map, are also featured. Weather data is provided by
AccuWeather, which has served as the forecast provider for
USA Today for most of the paper's existence (except from January 2002 to September 2012, when forecast data was provided by
The Weather Channel through a long-term multimedia content agreement with Gannett). In the bottom left-hand corner of the weather page is "Weather Focus", a graphic which explains various meteorological phenomena. On some days, the Weather Focus could be a photo of a rare meteorological event. On business holidays or days when bonus sections are included in the issue, the Money and Life sections are usually combined into one section, while combinations of the Friday Life editions into one section are common during quiet weeks. Advertising is often covered in the Monday Money section, with a review of a recent television ad, and after
Super Bowl Sunday, a review of the ads aired during the broadcast with the results of the
Ad Track live survey. Stock tables for individual stock exchanges (comprising one subsection for companies traded on the
New York Stock Exchange, and another for companies trading on
NASDAQ and the
American Stock Exchange) and
mutual indexes were discontinued with the 2012 redesign due to the myriad electronic ways to check individual stock prices, in line with most newspapers. Book coverage, including reviews and a national sales chart which debuted on October 28, 1994, is seen on Thursdays in Life, with the full
A.C. Nielsen television ratings chart printed on Wednesdays or Thursdays, depending on release. The paper also publishes the
Mediabase survey for several genres of music based on radio airplay on Tuesdays, along with their own chart of the top ten singles in general on Wednesdays. Because of the same limitations as its nationalized forecasts, the television page in Life, which provides
prime time and
late night listings (running from 8:00 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.
Eastern Time), incorporates boilerplate "
Local news" or "
Local programming" descriptions to denote time periods in which the five major English language broadcast networks (
ABC,
NBC,
CBS,
Fox and
The CW) cede airtime to allow their
owned and
affiliated stations to carry
syndicated programs or local newscasts. The television page has never carried local scheduling information similar to those in local newspapers. Like most national papers,
USA Today has no
comic strips. One of the staples of the News section is "Across the USA", a state-by-state roundup of headlines. The summaries consist of paragraph-length
Associated Press reports highlighting one story in each state, the
District of Columbia, and one
U.S. territory. Similarly, the "For the Record" page of the Sports section (which features sports scores for the previous four days of league play plus individual non-league events, seasonal league statistics and wagering lines for that day's games) previously featured a rundown of winning numbers from the previous deadline date for
all participating state lotteries and individual multi-state lotteries. Some traditions have been retained. The
lead story still appears on the upper-right side of the front page. Commentary and political cartoons occupy the last few pages of the News section. Stock and mutual fund data are presented in the Money section. But
USA Today is sufficiently different in aesthetics to be recognized on sight, even in a mix of other newspapers, such as at a
newsstand. The overall design and layout of
USA Today have been described as
neo-Victorian. On most of the sections' front pages, in the lower left-hand corner, are "USA Today Snapshots" graphs, which offer statistics on lifestyle interests according to the section (for example, a snapshot in "Life" could show how many people tend to watch a certain genre of television show based upon their mood). These "Snapshots" graphs employ icons roughly pertaining to the graph's subject (using the example above, the graph's bars could be made up of several TV sets or ended by one). Snapshots are loosely based on research by a national institute (with the credited source in fine print below the graph). The newspaper also features an occasional magazine supplement called
Open Air, which launched on March 7, 2008, and appears several times a year. Other
advertorials appear throughout the year, mainly on Fridays.
Opinion section The opinion section prints
USA Today editorials, columns by guest writers and members of the editorial board of contributors, letters to the editor, and editorial cartoons. One unique feature of the
USA Today editorial page is the publication of opposing points of view: alongside the editorial board's piece on the day's topic runs an opposing view by a guest writer, often an expert in the field. The Board of Contributors, which is distinct from the paper's news staff, chooses the opinion pieces that appear in each edition. From 1999 to 2002 and again from 2004 to 2015, the editorial page editor was Brian Gallagher, who has worked for the newspaper since its founding. Other members of the editorial board included deputy editorial page editor Bill Sternberg, executive forum editor John Siniff, op-ed/forum page editor Glen Nishimura, operations editor Thuan Le Elston, letters editor Michelle Poblete, web content editor Eileen Rivers, and editorial writers Dan Carney, George Hager, and Saundra Torry. The newspaper's website calls this group "demographically and ideologically diverse". For most of its history, the paper's political editorials (most of them linked to the presidential election cycle) had focused instead on major issues based on the differing concerns of voters. The avoidance of political editorials played a great part in
USA Today long-standing reputation for "fluff", but after its 30th anniversary revamp, the paper took a more active stance on political issues, calling for stronger gun laws after the
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. It heavily criticized the
Republican Party for both the
2013 government shutdown and the 2015 revolts in the
United States House of Representatives that ended with the resignation of
John Boehner as House Speaker. It also called out then-
President Barack Obama and other top members of the
Democratic Party for what it perceived as "inaction" during 2013–14, particularly over the
NSA scandal and the
ISIL beheading incidents. The editorial board broke from its "non-endorsement" policy for the first time on September 29, 2016, when it published an op-ed piece condemning the candidacy of
Republican nominee
Donald Trump, calling him "unfit for the presidency" due to his inflammatory campaign rhetoric (particularly that aimed at the press, with certain media organizations being openly targeted and even banned from campaign rallies, including
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
CNN and the
BBC, military veterans who had been prisoners of war, including 2008 Republican presidential candidate and Vietnam War veteran
John McCain, immigrants, and various ethnic and religious groups); his temperament and lack of financial transparency; his "checkered" business record; his use of false and hyperbolic statements; the inconsistency of his viewpoints and issues with his vision on domestic and foreign policy; and, based on comments he had made during his campaign and criticisms by both
Democrats and Republicans on these views, the potential risks to national security and constitutional ethics under a Trump administration, asking voters to "resist the siren song of a dangerous demagogue". The board wrote that the piece was not a "qualified endorsement" of Democratic nominee
Hillary Clinton, for whom it was unable to reach a consensus (some editorial board members expressed that Clinton's public service record would help her "serve the nation ably as its president", while others had "serious reservations about [her] sense of entitlement, [...] lack of candor and...
extreme carelessness in handling classified information"), suggesting instead
tactical voting against Trump and GOP seats in swing states, advising voters to decide whether to vote for either Clinton,
Libertarian nominee
Gary Johnson,
Green Party nominee
Jill Stein or a write-in candidate for president; or to focus on Senate, House and other down-ballot political races. In February 2018,
USA Today published an
op-ed by
Jerome Corsi, the DC bureau chief for the fringe conspiracy website
InfoWars. Corsi, a prominent
conspiracy theorist, was described by
USA Today as an "author" and "investigative journalist".
The Washington Post fact-checker said that "almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood." In 2020,
USA Today endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time,
Democratic nominee
Joe Biden. The newspaper also published an opposing editorial by Vice President
Mike Pence, which called for his and Trump's re-election. In 2024, after the presidential election, opinion fellow for USA Today Dace Potas published: Trump is president again and Democrats can blame Biden's ego.
USA Today was the only one of 42 prominent American daily newspapers rated as "moderate" by the
Boston University Library (all the others were rated as "leans liberal" or "leans conservative"), based on their editorial endorsements in the 2012 presidential election. ==Personnel==