Four newspaper groups pact for online ad sales venture

Four large newspaper companies are joining forces to sell ads on the Internet, hoping the larger reach will get more ad dollars. Each of the four companies, reports The NY Times, is transferring a portion of its online ad space to quadrantONE, a new company announced Friday. The companies include the New York Times Company, the Tribune Company, the Gannett Company, and the Hearst Corporation.

The joint venture, based in Chicago with 17 on staff, is to let national advertisers place ads on local websites with a single phone call. The sites belong to papers like The Los Angeles Times (which is a Tribune property), The Des Moines Register (Gannett), The Houston Chronicle (Hearst) and The Boston Globe (The New York Times Company).

Some of the companies’ flagship sites, however, will not be included, because they are not considered local. These include the sites of USA Today, a Gannett paper, and of The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, which are owned by the Times Company, reported the paper.
In total, quadrantONE will be able to reach about 50 million unique visitors a month, its executives said, citing Nielsen Online data.

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