HGTV And the Ventura County Star Form Online Content Partnership

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 8, 2001--

InsideVC.com to Feature HGTV.com Branded Content

Home & Garden Television (HGTV) has formed a partnership with the Ventura County Star to provide HGTV-branded online content to the newspaper's Web site, InsideVC.com. HGTV will provide home and garden-related articles from its HGTV.com Web site to InsideVC.com's Lifestyle section. In addition to the articles, InsideVC.com will feature links to related HGTV projects, resources, video and information.

To promote the new content partnership, the Ventura County Star will run teasers on the masthead of the Thursday Lifestyle section and also in the Sunday Garden column in the print edition, as well as on the InsideVC.com home page and Lifestyle page.

"As sister companies within the E.W. Scripps family, it makes perfect sense for us to work together and share our areas of expertise," said Jim Sexton, editorial director of HGTV.com. "HGTV gains valuable brand positioning in a key market, and the Ventura County Star gains content from one of the County's leading home and garden resources. It is a highly symbiotic relationship, and one we hope to repeat with other E.W. Scripps newspapers in the future."

"The type of quality content offered up by HGTV.com through our Internet site is what our readers have come to expect from us as the No. 1 media outlet in our region," commented Stephen Dana, the Ventura County Star's Director of Digital Media. "This relationship helps us solidify that standing as well as gives us an opportunity to expand on it."

The E.W. Scripps Company (NYSE:SSP) is a diverse media concern with interests in newspaper publishing, broadcast television, national television networks and interactive media. Scripps operates 21 daily newspapers, 10 broadcast TV stations and three cable television networks, with plans to launch a fourth.

The Ventura County Star (InsideVC.com), a six-edition newspaper serving the communities of Simi Valley, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks, Camarillo, Oxnard and Ventura, California, is an operating unit of the E.W. Scripps Company.

Scripps Networks cable television brands include Home & Garden Television, Food Network, Do It Yourself and Fine Living, due to launch early 2002.

Headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn., with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Atlanta, HGTV (Home & Garden Television), which is now distributed in more than 74 million U.S. households, is one of the fastest-growing networks in cable television history. Internationally, HGTV owns 33 percent of HGTV Canada and provides much of the Canadian network's daily programming. HGTV branded programming can also be seen in Japan, Australia, Thailand and the Philippines.

The company also operates Scripps Howard News Service, United Media, the worldwide licensing and syndication home of PEANUTS and DILBERT, and 31 Web sites, including hgtv.com, foodtv.com, diynet.com and comics.com.

--30--jgm/ny