New Verican product delivers your local news via email

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA (April 4, 2008) - Verican Inc., an independent company that provides Internet products to the newspaper industry, announced today the release of their third product, the Email Newsletter. With the Email Newsletter, Verican’s customers can send out scheduled emails featuring local headlines, events, weather, classifieds and advertising.

Training and one-time setup takes a newspaper approximately 15 minutes, and creating each daily or weekly Email Newsletter requires as little as 15 minutes time to copy and paste text into an easy-to-use web form. Headlines can include uploaded images and brief descriptions with links to newspaper websites.

“The Email Newsletter is a wonderfully convenient product for local newspapers,” said Eric Buskirk, CEO and founder of Verican. “The Newsletter creates high-revenue advertising space and drives traffic to newspaper websites. This is an ideal opportunity to better serve the Internet advertising needs of local businesses, especially restaurants that will now have an efficient means of reaching the community with banner ads and coupons. Even better, we’re offering this to our customers free of charge through August of this year.”

Getting started with the Newsletter couldn’t be simpler. Many of Verican’s customers already have email lists obtained through Verican’s Classified Order Entry (COE) product. To gain additional subscribers, the newspaper can promote the service with banner ads and links on their website. Additional emails can be easily uploaded.

One of the most unique qualities of the Email Newsletter is the Custom Classifieds feature. Each email subscriber can click on “Customize Results” in the Classifieds section of the Email Newsletter, and select up to 3 keywords for classifieds they would like to receive in their personalized Newsletter. For example, keyword “Mercedes” would return to the reader’s newsletter all matching classifieds ads. Newspapers on our Classifieds Network will have a distance option such that selecting “within 75 miles”, for example, will automatically return to the reader’s email edition matching classified ads from all Classified Network newspaper participants. This type of a reminder service drives significant value for the classifieds advertiser and reader.

In addition, newspapers can view individual reports detailing impression and click throughs. This data enables the editorial department to better understand their reader’s behavior, and the marketing department can better quantify the value they are delivering to advertisers.

The Sunday Paper of Atlanta, one of the first newspapers to adopt the Email Newsletter, has a subscriber base of 6,000 that is growing rapidly. “We wanted to make sure that we went with a reputable company that would take care of communicating with ISPs for us, so we wouldn’t have to worry about spam filters,” said Kristina Ackerman, the Sunday Paper’s Web Manager. “We use the Email Newsletter every Sunday to compliment our print edition. We send out our headlines, with an image and lead-in for our cover story, and with links to our website.”

Verican is a leading provider of network and advertising solutions to the newspaper industry. The Verican Network is built on a scalable “software as a service” (SaaS) business model, enabling newspapers to maximize the value of their online content with a series of integrated products including Classifieds Order Entry, Network Classifieds, Email Newsletters, Recruitment and Personals. Verican works with nearly 200 newspaper customers nationwide, and 8 statewide newspaper associations. For more information, please visit www.verican.com