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Creative Loafing's Southern Papers Join Ruxton Media Group

july 9, 2008  04:27 pm
For Immediate Release

The Ruxton Media Group's advertising reach expanded in the Southeast today, as four prominent regional newspapers were added to its national family of print and on-line publications.

Ruxton Media Group and Creative Loafing are pleased to announce that CL's publications in Atlanta, Tampa Bay, Charlotte and Sarasota have joined their corporate brethren in Chicago and Washington, D.C. as members of the Ruxton fold.

"We are very excited that these CL papers have chosen Ruxton to handle their national advertising needs," said Joe Larkin, Ruxton's senior vice president of sales operations. "They will be a great addition to the Ruxton network."

Under the arrangement, Ruxton will serve as the publications' exclusive representative for national print advertising. It also will provide non-exclusive representation for on-line advertising through its fast-growing Ruxton Digital Media Network.

The Ruxton-Creative Loafing partnership is a natural one, said Scott Tobias, president and chief operating officer of Ruxton parent company Village Voice Media.

"In our talks with [Creative Loafing CEO] Ben Eason and his talented management team, we've really appreciated the passion he has brought to this discussion and to our evolution as a sales organization," Tobias said. Eason has already worked with Ruxton and VVM to create the Publishers Advisory Committee, an industry group set up to establish state-of-the-art standards and practices for on-line advertising.

"We believe our print exclusive partnership with Ruxton will allow a more unified approach to selling the alternative weekly audience to national advertisers and will be the start of a more cooperative relationship selling into the digital space not only with Ruxton but within the entire alternative publishing industry," said Eason.

Ruxton and Creative Loafing have shared goals regarding digital growth, noted Eason, and in some respects a shared heritage; Ruxton was initially formed by the owners of the Chicago Reader, which CL acquired in 2007 as part of a deal that also included the Washington, D.C. City Paper.

Village Voice Media acquired Ruxton from the original Reader owners in 1995.

With last year's acquisition of the Reader and City Paper, Creative Loafing now owns six alternative weeklies with a combined weekly print circulation of more than 450,000.

The addition of Atlanta, Tampa, Charlotte and Sarasota means Ruxton now has a print presence in 43 American cities, including 19 of the top 20 U.S. markets. The group's total weekly print circulation now exceeds 3.2 million and its digital network -- which encompasses the newspaper websites for those same 43 publications -- provides more than 10 million unique visitors and close to 62 million page views.

Thanks to proprietary measurement procedures and a wide range of sophisticated operational tools, Ruxton this year achieved 59 percent growth in digital sales across its national network.

Ruxton's national clients include Volkswagen, Sprint, Anheuser Busch Co., T-Mobile, Bacardi, Ford Motor Company and American Express.

Contact:
Joe Larkin
Senior Vice President
The Ruxton Media Group
joe.larkin@ruxton.com
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