• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 3, 2015

Advertisers have yet another way to make national ad buys across multiple newspaper publishers. Tribune Publishing has launched the MediaWorks Publisher Consortium, enabling advertisers to create print and digital ad campaigns spanning newspapers in the country’s top media markets.

Among other benefits, the network offers members proprietary first-party subscriber data that should allow them to target ads more precisely.

At launch, the MediaWorks network consists of Tribune’s own properties, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun and The San Diego Union-Tribune, as well as a number of newspapers owned by other publishers, such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle, Miami Herald and St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among others.

Tribune touted the combination of local reach and national scale afforded by the MediaWorks consortium, which offers advertisers access to more than 30 of the top DMAs across the country, reaching 70% of the U.S. population.

Advertisers can target campaigns using subscriber data down to Zip code and neighborhood levels. MediaWorks is also offering pre- and post-campaign analytics to help advertisers and publishers craft strategies and measure ad effectiveness, including data drawn from 1.6 billion retail customer records.

As noted, MediaWorks is just one of a number of newspaper ad networks, including the Newspaper National Network, which brings together 25 newspaper companies in America under the aegis of the Newspaper Association of America, offering advertisers access to over 9,000 newspapers nationwide. There is also the Local Media Consortium, which includes over 1,600 newspapers and local broadcasters.

Some other national newspaper networks have come and gone. Back in 2008, Tribune joined forces with The New York Times Co., Hearst, and Gannett to launch QuadrantOne to pool online ad inventory. The joint venture eventually rolled out programmatic ad sales, but was later shut down in 2013.