• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, April 14, 2009

Seeking to boost its mobile distribution with more Kindle offerings, USA Today is making some blogs and online community features available via Kindle, the portable electronic reader from Amazon. The move comes as struggling newspaper publishers look to new digital content strategies, hoping to recoup some of their losses in print ad revenue.

USA Today online features now available on Kindle include Cruise Log, covering all things relating to sea cruises; Game Hunters, a community for gamers; Lifeline Live, for celebrity news, OnDeadline, for breaking news; Game On!, which covers sports; The Oval, for political newshounds; Pop Candy, on pop culture and Today in the Sky, dealing with air travel.

According to USA Today, each new feature will carry a monthly subscription fee of between $0.99 and $1.99 to gain access to a particular blog or online community. That comes on top of the $11.99 monthly subscription to the newspaper itself.

While expanding on the mobile front, USA Today has been taking some hits on the print side, which represents the vast majority of its revenues.

As of June 1, for example, Marriott International Inc. said it will no longer deliver free copies of the newspaper to every guest room; instead, guests have to ask for the newspaper when they check in at the front desk. Marriott expects this to reduce the number of issues delivered by 18 million per year, or about 49,300 per day.

The hotelier's move will take a noticeable bite out of USA Today's circulation. Until now, it was one of the few newspapers to maintain relatively even circ numbers, as other big titles plunged in recent years.

Confronted with declining print ad revenues and readership, many newspaper executives are looking to mobile devices, and Amazon's Kindle specifically, to regain some of the ground lost on the print side.

A spate of articles in business and consumer mags have suggested that Kindle could even "save" newspapers. To secure this end, newspapers must monetize content in a more remunerative way than their online strategy, which has failed to produce significant revenue streams.

Two possibilities include charging subscription fees for content delivered via Kindle, or charging more for ads placed alongside that content. At present, it's unclear whether consumers or advertisers will pay for something they can get for less money (or in the case of consumers, for free) online.