This has been in works for a while as an alternative to the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) newspaper consortium, as well as the Google-newspapers ad effort, and now it is finally launching: Tribune, Gannett (NYSE: GCI), Hearst and the New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) are forming a joint new company called quadrantONE, and transferring some of their open online inventory to the firm to sell. A full list of affiliate sites in the network is here (PDF link). The four companies are also investing in the new company.

SEE ALSO: New Newspaper Ad Net May Compete With Yahoo; Gannett, Hearst, Tribune, MediaNews, Cox In Talks

The JV company, headed by Dana Hayes (current SVP of sales at Tribune Interactive) as the interim CEO, will be based in Chicago and will hire 17 people. The network will have reach of about 50 million monthly unique visitors and covers 27 out of the top 30 markets, according to the company. It is open to adding other companies and newspapers into the network, though not as co-owners. Interestingly, when the reports about this JV started leaking out last year in November, MediaNews Group and Cox Newspapers were also supposed to be part of the talks, but are not included in the final deal, it seems.

Since the expressed purpose of the company is to help advertisers reach local audiences, some of the national/international papers NOT included: USA Today, a Gannett paper, and of The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune.

SFChronicle: quadrantONE will focus on display advertising and will let marketers target their ads by geography, subject and other categories. It is teaming with a yet-to-be-named technology company to supply a system that can provide ads to all the newspaper sites and report results to advertisers.

As NYT helpfully points out in a story, several of the newspapers in quadrantONE are also part of Yahoo’s newspaper consortium, and all of the companies are partial owners of the Newspaper National Network, a network that allows national advertisers to place ads across thousands of papers’ print editions and, more recently, online sites.

WSJ: While Yahoo’s partnership doesn’t have guaranteed access to the site ad inventory of its affiliate newspapers, quadrantOne will get access to a certain percentage of the ad inventory.