Mark T. Waters, senior vice president and Phoenix market manager for CBS radio, and Tara Blanc, publisher of North Central News, Inc., in Phoenix, have formed a marketing partnership between the two organizations (photo by Teri Carnicelli).

Under the arrangement, CBS Radio will promote NCN’s local publications, including the North Central News, Tempe Town News and Oldtown Scottsdale News and their associated Web sites, both on-air and on-line. In exchange, NCN will promote each of the three CBS stations through the company's print publications and Web sites.

    “It’s a great opportunity for both partners,” said NCN president Tara Blanc. “The CBS stations will have access to a deeper pool of potential local listeners while NCN will have the ability to create a wider awareness of its products.”

Mark T. Waters, senior vice president and Phoenix market manager for CBS radio, also sees the partnership as a win-win. “It’s a natural fit—local, grassroots radio stations working with local community newspapers to reach niche markets,” points out Waters, who has been in radio sales in the Phoenix Metro market for 22 years.

Waters adds that CBS Radio’s president and CEO, Dan Mason, has a real focus on grassroots marketing. “His take is that radio should always be local, not syndicated,” he explains. “He really wants each station to focus on its local community.”

Similarly, NCN’s three products are positioned as “hometown” newspapers, covering issues such as development, crime and city government, but also offering the feel-good stories that one comes to expect from a truly “local” paper, such as Boy Scout Eagle projects, local volunteer profiles, students who have won awards, service clubs and more.

“Niche publications, such as local, hometown newspapers, make up the only segment of the newspaper industry that is growing,” Blanc said. “CBS Radio’s success with programming that is designed to fit the station's specific format and serve its local community certainly dovetails with this growing interest in specifically local information.”

Waters expects this unique partnership to help increase awareness of CBS Radio’s three local brands among NCN’s combined readership of 64,000. Blanc, in turn, hopes that radio listeners will visit NCN’s three Web sites (northcentralnews.net, tempetownnews.net and otscottsdalenews.net) to learn more about the publications, browse their advertisers, and to take advantage of the company’s new online classified ads. Each news site also will be linked to each CBS Radio station home page, and vice versa.

CBS Radio is one of the largest major-market operators in the United States. A division of CBS Corporation, CBS RADIO operates 140 radio stations offering a wide variety of programming, all of which are in the nation's top 50 markets. NCN began publishing its first newspaper in 1999; its three free local community newspapers now serve north central Phoenix, central and south Scottsdale and the city of Tempe.

In a world where “big media” seems to be growing ever bigger, CBS Radio and North Central News, Inc., have taken a small step to help promote their hyper-local presence and to relay the message, across the airwaves and in black and white, that your hometown news and hometown radio are still very much about you.