As of this week, Starbucks (SBUX) has started offering copies of USA Today to its java-drinking customers. The flagship paper of media giant Gannett (GCI), USA Today is the most widely circulated newspaper in the U.S. with nearly 2 million copies in print.

SBUX claims that more newspaper options will help folks linger with their morning coffee and catch up on world events, since the quality national and international news in USA Today resonates with their core customers. While that may make for a good press release, there’s a fundamental flaw in the logic of this partnership.

Despite the fact that the newspaper will be available in the coffee 6,500 company-operated Starbucks locations across the United States on Monday through Friday, not a single SBUX store will feature Gannett’s big-name paper on the Weekends.

Why? Because USA Today isn’t printed on Saturdays and Sundays!

This is the gaping hole in any strategy to get customers to hang out at Starbucks nosing over the news. Starbucks does brisk business on weekdays, but the working crowd tends to grab a cup of joe and go. The crowd that tends to be more thoughtful and move more slowly are weekend patrons — a group that USA Today cannot reach.

As for why Gannett would push to get back into the game right now, the most logical answer is that the company behind USA Today is willing to try anything. Gannett reports that average weekday newsstand sales of its paper declined 18% in the second half of 2009 over the year before, while The New York Times Co. (NYT) saw weekday sales of its namesake paper fall 16% across the same period. It’s tough to argue that SBUX sales have been a huge boon for the Times, or that USA Today can stop the bleeding in circulation from this deal. But GCI execs have to do something.

USA Today was actually one of the first newspapers sold by Starbucks back in the 1990s, but in 2000 The New York Times agreed to an exclusive three-year deal with SBUX. Media industry insiders claim this was reportedly an exchange of rack space in stores for ad space in print. Since that initial agreement, The Times has been the only paper sold in most Starbucks stores, excluding stores in malls and airports, which had a choice of selling a wider variety of papers.

As for the benefit for Starbucks, the company has been trying very hard in recent years to make its shops more of a destination than just a coffee counter. That includes WiFi (two hours of access for free with a Starbucks card), cozy chairs and reading material. The idea could be paying off — in January, the company posted positive same-store sales in its Q4 earnings report to break about two years of consecutive declines.

But as we all know, consumer spending and unemployment trends have a lot more to do with sales of discretionary items like coffee and newspapers than anything else.

Tell us what you think here.

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