They account for almost all the Bay Area's daily newspaper distribution, and now Hearst -- owner of the Chronicle -- and Media News -- which runs the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and many other papers -- are going digital in a new way. So is Examiner.com.

The companies have signed a wireless deal to take their news mobile, via cell phones, iPhones and an assortment of other mobile devices.

The company at the back end is Verve Wireless Inc., whose CEO, Art Howe, is not the former A's manager but a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The deal might be groundbreaking for Bay Area media companies, but that's hardly the case for Verve, which already provides similar services for more than 450 local media outlets and news organizations, including the Associated Press and the New York Times.

Full text of the press release after the break.

Encinitas, CA – June 25, 2009 – Verve Wireless, the leading provider of mobile publishing technologies to local media companies, today announced partnerships with Media News Group, A.H. Belo Corporation, Hearst Corporation, and Cox Newspapers to mobilize local media properties such as The Denver Post, The Dallas Morning News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Palm Beach Post, and Examiner.com. Verve now mobilizes over 450 local media properties, covering the top 200 designated market areas in the U.S. and continues its international expansion by partnering with the Khaleej Times of the United Arab Emirates. In just three months, Verve increased by 85% the amount of local media companies that it has brought to the mobile web reaching more than three million consumers, serving over 47.5 million monthly page views, and delivering more than a million mobile video streams per month.

Main Street Adopting Mobile Faster than Madison Ave.
Local media publishers like Media General's Richmond Times Dispatch and their portal (Richmond.com) are using Verve's proprietary publishing and mobile advertising system to extend their communities and readership onto mobile phones as well as utilize their local ad sales teams' knowledge and existing relationships with local businesses to offer mobile ad solutions. Small businesses from all across the country are using mobile in new and innovative ways to reach their customers.

"We have been advertising in print and online with Media General and are quite impressed with the results we have gotten from our initial mobile campaigns," said Brent Barkin, vice president and director e-commerce for Shoe Station, a regional shoe store in the southeast with an online retail store at Shoestation.com. "We created a mobile campaign that included a text code that we added to our website and to the paper receipts for in store purchases, within minutes we were seeing responses that converted into sales." "Our core focus remains making it easy for our local media partners to easily bring their content to mobile including news content and advertising," said Tom Kenney, president and co-founder of Verve Wireless. "We have a training program for our local media partners to educate them on how to best take advantage of mobile. Once they start using it, they see the potential and their ad sales teams start to create unique and creative programs for their clients."

Deep Regional Reach for National Brands
Verve has the largest local mobile ad network covering the top 200 DMAs in the U.S. In just the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Verve serves over two million mobile page views a month. National brand advertisers are increasingly leveraging Verve's AdCel ad platform to reach mobile consumers based on a variety of targeting parameters ranging from regional down to a hyper-local neighborhood level, creating additional revenue streams for their partners while providing efficient and scalable media placements for national brands. "We are serving over a million page views in each of the top DMAs and even in the smaller markets, there are increasingly larger numbers of mobile views. People want to stay connected with news and events that are occurring in their communities, and mobile is quickly becoming the preferred method," Kenney remarked.

New iPhone 3.0 Web App Module and Mobile Video for Publishers

Additionally, Verve rolled out enhancements to their platform that automatically creates a version of the publisher's site optimized for the new Safari browser on iPhones, as well as providing mobile video delivery across the leading smartphones in the market.

The iPhone module allows publishers of all sizes and markets to participate in the fastest growing smartphone segment. Publisher's can create a specialized version of their own mobile site to take advantage of the Safari browser's unique capabilities, such as location awareness, automatic short cut that places an app icon on the phone for quick access, exceptional layout and navigation elements, and world class rich media delivery. The demand for this new module was stemming from news organizations like The Orange County Register who see in excess of 40% of their mobile web traffic coming from iPhones. Demand for mobile video is also increasing, and Verve's partners are now able to distribute their video assets across the leading mobile handset devices, taking advantage of the immediacy and impact of short-form video clips of local news and events. In less than two weeks since expanding the video capability network wide, Verve has seen mobile video consumption more than double to over one million discrete views per month.