Cox Newspapers Expands Relationship with Blog Aggregator

By: Jennifer Saba Cox Newspapers said today it's expanding its relationship with blog aggregator Pluck Corp. The Austin-based company will feed relevant content from blogs to the Web sites of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News, and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post. Cox's Austin (Texas) American-Statesman has been using Pluck's blog syndication since 2005.

"Pluck gives us credible options to pick and choose our content" to get incremental page views, said Leon Levitt, Cox Newspapers' vice president of digital media. "It's the most economical way of driving traffic that we can sell."

Since soft-launching Pluck's BlogBurst across its latest set of properties, Cox has attracted more than 5 million page views of blog content.

BlogBurst syndicates more than 3,700 blogs, which are editorially filtered and cover a wide variety of topics like travel, fashion, sports and politics. "We are pretty similar to a wire service," said Pluck CEO and co-founder Dave Panos. "We have full licensing rights and direct relationships with bloggers who write on a range of topics. Many are professional or semi-professionals with deep vertical expertise."

BlogBurst syndicates such blogs like the popular TechCrunch.

Pluck also works with USA Today, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and The San Diego Union-Tribune.