• by Erik Sass , March 17, 2009

Unfazed by the sharp economic downturn and their own financial woes, newspaper publishers are pushing ahead with initiatives to expand their cooperative digital distribution and ad sales platforms. On the sales side, the latest round of expansion comes at QuadrantOne, a company formed by four major newspaper publishers for online ad sales, while Yahoo's newspaper consortium has recruited new members.

QuadrantOne, a national network for online display ads formed by Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and The New York Times Company in February 2008, announced a slew of new hires as well as some promotions in recent weeks.

At the top level, the company hired Monika Belur as marketing director; previously, Belur marketed media brands like the Travel Channel, Discovery and TLC. She has experience in consumer, sales, online, and traditional direct marketing. In New York, the company also hired Stacy Freedman as the East Coast account executive for entertainment and Melanie Pursglove as Midwest account executive for entertainment.

Around the country, it hired Carolyn Goldfarb as sales development manager for the central region, based in Chicago; Matthew Aporta as the West Coast account executive for entertainment, based in Los Angeles; Maria Caruso as sales development manager in San Francisco; and Danielle Morris as sales development manager for the Central region, based in Detroit. Finally, Kim Ripps was promoted to East Coast sales manager.

The Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, founded in November 2006 to bring newspapers together for ad sales as well as content distribution, announced two new members at the Newspaper Association of America's MediaXchange summit: The Boston Globe and The St. Petersburg Times joined a member roster of almost 800 newspapers. On the ad sales side, Yahoo also said that over 120 of these are using its "Apt" ad sales platform, which allows them to use behavioral targeting in ad sales and placement.

The digital expansion comes on the heels of good news for newspaper Web sites from Nielsen Online, which tracks Web site traffic for the NAA. According to Nielsen, in January the number of monthly unique visitors to newspaper Web sites increased 7.9 million to 74.8 million, a jump of 11.9% over the same month in 2008. Per the same measurements, 44% of all Web users visited newspaper Web sites in January, an increase of 7.3% over January 2008. The number of page views generated increased 15.4% to 3.7 billion.