Tribune Publishing is introducing an initiative to sell advertising at publications across the country through a partnership with dozens of newspapers.
The Chicago-based newspaper company’s MediaWorks unit is set to announce a so-called publisher consortium this morning in which an advertiser can buy a single campaign in America’s top 30 media markets.
The advertising campaigns can be print, digital or both and run in publications ranging from Tribune’s Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune to Newsday, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and about two dozen other regional titles.
Tribune says the MediaWorks Publisher Consortium will enable marketers to target local audiences at national scale. It will also provide data and analytics about subscribers that the ad campaigns are reaching to help measure investment return.
As a result of readers and advertisers moving to digital platforms, newspaper companies like Tribune have been hobbled by steep losses in their core print advertising businesses in recent years. To mitigate the decline, they have been scrambling to harness emerging revenue streams like digital subscriptions, while also developing new types of advertising programs.
Tribune’s new program is similar to the Local Media Consortium, a group of more than 1,600 newspapers and broadcast outlets that banded together to cross-sell advertising and achieve collective digital scale. A Tribune spokesperson wouldn’t specify the Publisher Consortium’s financial terms but said they were “mutually beneficial for all parties.”
Tribune Publishing, which was spun off from the broadcast-focused Tribune Media nearly a year ago, saw total revenues decline from $417 million to $396 million in the first three months of the year, while advertising revenues dropped 5.7 percent to $220 million.
The publicly traded company recently rounded out its executive leadership team,installing veterans of major newspaper and magazine companies like Time Inc. andThe New York Times to execute a turnaround plan.
