Gatehouse Media, which publishes lots and lots of local newspapers, has formed an interesting and innovative partnership with local shopping provider Yokel. The deal offers local product information for consumers and advertising programs for local merchants.
Yokel has been quiet for some time, but this deal indicates the company is still alive and kicking. The press release provides an overview of the partnership and its mechanics:
Fairport-based Gatehouse Media, Inc. has partnered with Yokel, Inc., a Boston-based retail search engine provider, to create a groundbreaking new hyper-local service for shoppers and merchants.
The locally-targeted retail program will be branded as WickedLocal Shopping in GateHouse’s more than 100 Boston-based Web sites and print publications and TotallyLocal Shopping across its hundreds of other community-based properties in more than 23 states.
Shop.TotallyLocal.com and Shop.WickedLocal.com, once integrated with their respective local community Web sites, will combine to make it easy for shoppers to find specific products in stores near them and for local retailers to offer their products and services to these shoppers, online and in print.
For local merchants, The TotallyLocal solution makes it easy to create an online business profile and to market their business in town and across the Internet. Included in the service, participating retailers products will appear on leading search engines, and the most popular products that consumers search for will automatically be featured in print ads in local Gatehouse-owned newspapers giving rise to a first: consumer generated print advertising.
(TotallyLocal is the Gatehouse’s online yellow pages; Shop WickedLocal is Boston-area local product search site.)
The deal features newspaper-site integration for Yokel hosted pages. (Yokel had been crawling for the data, but may have developed additional methods of finding what’s available in local stores.) Gatehouse is also soliciting merchant signups and product inventory information, which will then be marketed online and in print (via “reverse publishing”). There’s also broader Internet distribution for merchants, which is being managed by a third party.
This program is an instance of larger trends:
- Newspapers stepping up SMB marketing outreach and efforts (and competing with YP)
- Local product inventory information becoming more widely available online
Screenwerk 
February 2, 2008 at 5:50 pm
[…] of online shopping») et dans ce domaine, la dernière initiative en date, c’est celle de Yokel qui vient de s’allier à un gros éditeur de journaux locaux dans le but d’associer visibilité sur le Net et […]