Gannett, McClatchy, and Tribune, the 3 largest newspaper/magazine publishers are banding together to create an “open [advertising] network” to try to pull in national advertisers.

They will each contribute approximately 10% of their advertising space to the network to try to pull in national advertisers, no doubt to try to upsell them and get them into the print media.

The three have already worked together on other projects such as the Careerbuilder/Shoplocal/Topix.net deal.

Seems to me that they will sell national spots to these national advertisers (that may have no local value) and try to upsell them on their television networks and newspapers/magazines. Large national advertisers are cheaper (cost-saving) to obtain and maintain than multiple small advertisers (such as a SME) but will often also mean less revenue (those local ads mean they are more targeted and will often command more of a premium in an open & competitive marketplace such as Adwords).

They’ve definitely been feeling the heat from competing online advertising as well as competition over content from blogs and others, prompting some to predict their ultimate demise (not to mention all the media companies jumping off the newspapers bandwagon.

It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for them, who will purchase part of or all of whom, who chooses to increase revenues versus cut costs, who will join forces with whom, etc.

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