Throughout this assignment, you will peruse the Wall Street Journal for articles related to your companys strengths and weaknesses. You will also peruse the Journal for opportunities and threats related to your companys industry/industries. The goal will be to identify and clip at least two articles related to each of the SWOT factors. In other words, you will identify (and clip) at least two articles related to your companys strengths, two articles related to your companys weaknesses, two articles related to opportunities, and two articles related to threats, for a total of at least 8 articles.

A few notes:

• This assignment is NOT the full SWOT analysis that you will perform as part of your Strategic Analysis and the Final Case Competition. For example, in gathering only two articles related to strengths, its unlikely youll be able to address all nine links on Porters Value Chain. But thats okay. This is simply a preliminary step, focused on a single publication, to give you some experience that will make it easier to assemble that SWOT analysis later on.
• All articles should be from the WSJ. This is not yet the time to dig into Business Week, Fortune, etc. (Plenty of time for those when you perform the full SWOT on your company later on.)
• In addition to perusing current issues, you may find it useful to use the WSJ archives to find articles related to your companys strengths and weaknesses. (You have easy access to the recent archives with your WSJ subscription which you can customize. Archives are also available through the Kent Library although they are lagged about 1 week behind.)
• You should cite (in-text citations) all sources used in your paper (APA style is expected).

Part 1 (approximately 1 page): Briefly explain how each article is related to your companys strengths and weaknesses, and industry-wide opportunities and threats.

Part 2 (approximately 1-2 pages): Explain how your companys strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are related to Porters Five Forces at work in your companys industry/industries (you already know this stuff from your industry analysis). For example, one of your companys strengths may be its control on costs. But what effect does this have on their suppliers? To what extent does this affect the threat of suppliers? The key here is to tie what you find about Ss & Ws together with the Os & Ts that emerge from considering Porters Five Forces. This is the level of complexity that you will be thinking at for your final strategic analysis paper and final case competition presentation.