The technical nuts and bolts of Hearst's news aggregation site LMK.com are being provided by Evri, the Seattle startup backed by billionaire Paul Allen. LMK is an automated news service -- similar to Google News -- that pulls information from various sources on various topics (college football, Barack Obama, etc.) and then aggregates that news in one place.

Hearst, the publishing giant which also owns the Seattle P-I, is using Evri's content recommendation engine and API's for articles, images, search and trends. At this point, there's no Evri branding on the site. But that will change in the coming weeks.

Evri isn't talking about the business terms of the deal, though they say they are looking forward to a long-term relationship with the New York company. That will include building out LMK's vertical sites, essentially automated niche publications.

The first of those is a detailed niche site around college football, with each major team getting its own page. (You can see the University of Washington page here). On the niche sites you can see schedules, rankings, player profiles, stats and photos. Readers also can get information from local blogs and news organizations.

The Evri engine is not perfect. For example, when I visited a few moments ago, the top story on the University of Washington football page was a story titled "Live chat: Talking UW football with Mulhern and Polzin." Those names probably aren't familiar to UW husky fans, since they are sports writers in Madison, Wisconsin following the University of Wisconsin. (Also a UW).

But when it works -- see TechMeme as an example -- aggregation can be a very powerful model.

In a way, the college football content from LMK is not unlike what Seattle-based Rivals.com tried to pull off in the late 90s.

The difference is, LMK doesn't employ writers or editors to compile the information. (In fact, a Hearst executive tells TechCrunch that LMK has only one employee). Instead, using Evri's semantic search engine, it automatically sucks content in from sources like The Sporting News, BleacherReport.com and others.

Evri has sealed deals with other publishing companies in the past, namely The Washington Post and The Times of London. Hearst is looking to build out LMK around other niche sites in the coming weeks.