Yahoo wants more locally produced content, and it has found a Denver-based company to meet its need: Associated Content, which has some 380,000 freelancers writing articles ranging from the news to advice. Yahoo is expected to pay about $100 million for the company, which was founded in 2004 and employs just 50 people in Denver and 20 in New York, according to The Denver Post.

California-based Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz says, “Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about, and open up new and creative avenues for advertisers to engage with consumers across our network.”

Associated Content heralded the change as good for its employees, contributors, partners, and customers. “While in the short term business continues as usual, the possibilities for the company and our contributors are enormous,” says a statement on the company’s website.

There’s a trend toward producing localized content among companies like Yahoo. AOL, which spun off from Time Warner in late 2009, is working with SEED, a company much like Associated Content that invites place-based contributors to blog, write, and post on several themed websites under the AOL umbrella, according to a  Time magazine blog.