paidContent.org - Gannett Lifts The Curtain On Local/National Hybrid Site ContentOne

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David Kaplan

paidContent.org
Tuesday, January 6, 2009; 2:07 AM

Gannett (NYSE: GCI) is going live with its local/national web hybrid ContentOne this morning, says Jim Hopkins on his Gannett Blog. The program was introduced by execs speaking at the UBS Media Week conference last month. At the time, Craig Dubow, Gannett's chairman, president and CEO, said ContentOne would serve as an exchange between its 85 local papers' websites and USA Today's site on the national level. He also described the idea behind ContentOne as "local content on a national level," adding that it will use the regionally focused MomsLikeMe social net and Metromix web guide as the foundation. ContentOne would operate as a single site and serve as an easy access point for advertisers targeting readers both local and national level.

In a memo obtained by Hopkins, Gannett execs said that USAT will generate most of the items for ContentOne. The items will then be passed along to local papers' sites, who are instructed to make the content look like their own by adding their respective logos and local ads. Gannett is telling ContentOne marketers that their ads could reach 50 million monthly uniques through this program?which is quite a boast, since, as Hopkins points out, Gannett's combined uniques in September was a little more than half that target: 25.4 million, according to the third-quarter earnings statement.