THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 30, 1996 TAG: 9609300076
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 44 lines
Say you live in Norfolk and want to find a restaurant in the sprawl of Virginia Beach.
Landmark Communications Inc. and Zip2, an Internet advertising company from California, announced a partnership Saturday that will allow a person to call up a restaurant and print out a detailed map. Or maybe read a menu, send the restaurant e-mail or, eventually, make a reservation.
Landmark has licensed Zip2's technology and will integrate it by the end of the year into the online efforts of six of its newspapers: The Virginian-Pilot, Greensboro News & Record, The Roanoke Times, Carroll County Times in Westminster, Md., Citrus County Chronicle in Florida and the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, Ky.
Michael Alston, general manager of Interactive Media at The Virginian-Pilot, said he began looking for an Internet ``Yellow Pages'' company for just the Pilot Online. He had nearly given up and was resolved to creating something from scratch when he discovered Zip2, a Palo Alto, Calif., company. Alston said Zip2's product was so good he recommended Landmark buy licenses for all of its papers.
``Automatically, we would have all 42,000 businesses in Hampton Roads in a basic listing at no cost to them,'' Alston said. ``We would be able to put your business on the Internet even if you don't have a computer.''
For a business without an Internet connection, Alston said a person online could click on ``fax'' and send the business a fax through Pilot Online's system.
For consumers, the new service will not only provide ``one-stop shopping'' for any Hampton Roads business but also information about 16 million businesses throughout the United States, Alston said. Zip2 will help bring together other advertising on Pilot Online - real estate, automobile, employment and other classified ads.
``We really didn't have a one-size-fits-all Internet solution (until now),'' Alston said. ``This is a high-tech solution, but it's very friendly to the business and the consumer.''
Knight-Ridder Inc., one of Landmark's partners in Norfolk-based InfiNet, signed a similar deal that will enable Knight-Ridder's 26 online services to use Zip2, the companies announced. by CNB