Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Tribune buy stake in Topix.net

Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune, three of the largest U.S. newspaper chains, have each bought a 25 percent stake in Topix.net, a privately held startup that aggregates and categorizes online news, the companies said Wednesday.

The newspaper companies expect that Topix.net technology will allow them to improve and extend their online editorial and ad sales activities, while Topix.net plans to leverage their financial, content, advertising and audience assets to grow its operations.

"They have enormous amounts of assets that they bring to the table and that we can draw on, which makes this a dream deal for us," said Rich Skrenta, chief executive officer and co-founder of Topix.net.

Likewise, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune will benefit from Topix.net's news aggregation and categorization technology, he said. "If you want to have success online, you need the right technology, and working with Topix.net is going to add some pretty compelling technology to their mix. It has the ability to catalyze a lot of extra value for them," Skrenta said.

Topix.net will remain editorially and operationally independent, said Skrenta, who will continue as CEO of the Palo Alto, California, company. This means that Topix.net will maintain the freedom to strike deals with other online news producers, he said.

"They (Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune) completely understand that. We had a lot of discussions with them about this very point. The deal is structured deliberately to keep us independent. They like what we're doing and they want us to continue to operate in this way," Skrenta said.

Topix.net was founded in 2002 and officially launched its service a little over a year ago, he said. The company aggregates news from over 10,000 online sources and categorizes the articles both by topics and by geographical area. That way, users can configure Topix.net in a very granular way to show only the news they are interested in.

Topix.net generates revenue through advertising and by syndicating its content. The company, which has nine employees, became profitable in December 2004, Skrenta said.

This is not the first time that competitors Gannett, Tribune and Knight-Ridder have formed a partnership. The companies are partners in other joint ventures, such as the jobs Web site CareerBuilder.com.