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OMMA Publish kicked off in New York on Wednesday with a conversation between All Things D’s Peter Kafka (@pkafka) and Yahoo’s VP of Media, Jimmy Pitaro.

Pitaro provided background on Yahoo’s decision to buy Associated Content (more on Media Post.) He also revealed that Yahoo’s decision to focus on creating more local original content (rather than strictly linking and aggregating) stemmed from access to greater “audience insight.”

As Mark Walsh explained on Media Post’s Raw blog, with Associated Content comes not only an army of freelancers, but also “SEO-based technology for discerning stories people want to read about” — and what ad inventory can be filled.

Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson explored the wheeling and dealing behind the acquisition in “The Inside Story: How Yahoo Bought Associated Content.”

According to Carlson, Yahoo initially had concerns about  Associated Content’s ability to produce high-quality content and also “the fact that these freelance platforms assign some stories based on data gathered by algorithms — how can a robot know what people want to read?” Intent matters.

Before the purchase, Yahoo put Associated Content to a secret test and also performed a “quality audit” of their stories.

In the end, Associated Content’s local coverage generated a lot of clicks and reader interest, and as a result, Yahoo was sold on their product. The company is now in the process of integrating and developing new programs with both the new content and data intelligence.

The next step? Having “editors… commission stories based on what Yahoo can tell about reader interest from its vast reserves of Yahoo search data.”

We’ve been paying a lot of attention to these developments over the past few days. I suppose there is only one thing left to ask. If Yahoo can do it (i.e., monetize search users) why can’t newspapers, with their seemingly endless supply of superb, no “quality audit”-needed content, do the same?

— Lee Glandorf

On Twitter: @LeeGlandorf