bCentral Licenses Business News

In a move that indicates bCentral is not shedding its role as a portal for small business owners, Microsoft has announced a strategic content-sharing relationship with American City Business Journals (ACBJ), a publisher of business journals in 40 U.S. cities.

Business Journal Content

Under the agreement, whose financial terms were not made public, ACBJ will provide location-specific news, including updates several times a day, to bCentral. This information will be available both through an index, organized by city, on the main bCentral site (www.bcentral.com), and through 40 localized sites with URLs such as seattle.bcentral.com. Additionally, the agreement allows MSNBC and ACBJ to publish news stories from one another’s sites.

ACBJ had already published about 40% of the content from its print publications on its bizjournals.com portal. Now all this content will be redirected to URLs ending in “bcentral.com.” Stories from each of its individual print publications will be published under a local URL (for example, the online version of The Denver Business Journal is now at denver.bcentral.com), while the entire ACBJ national portal will now be redirected to “bizjournals.bcentral.com.” This arrangement may increase bCentral’s traffic numbers, allowing it to improve the terms of its agreements with advertising partners, who offer a variety of products and services (such as credit-card processing or office supplies) through the site.