Silicon Alley online content syndication start-up Screaming Media hopes to raise $75 million by offering stock to the public this year. The company filed documents in advance of a planned initial public offering this week.

Screaming Media is basically a content syndicate -- an online update on the kind of service that newspaper syndicates have long provided: aggregating content from content creators and redistributing it to various content publishers where it appears. Screaming Media collects frees from the content republisher and pays the original content providers.

Although the company existed as Interactive Connection since the mid 1990s, it is only in the past year and a half that the company has refashioned its offerings, in the process expanding from a staff of 8 at the end of 1998 to a staff of 141 this past January.

For 1999 Screaming Media reported revenues of just under $3 million and a net loss of just over $13 million, although that loss figure includes a $6 million charge for employees' and directors' stock compensation.

The company is sitting on $22 million in cash but with the proceeds of the proposed stock sale would have a war chest of nearly $100 million. The company will need the cash since Screaming Media is already in a pitched battle for both mind- and marketshare with competitors like iSyndicate. Last summer iSyndicate raised $14 million in venture funding. Though it's not a vast sum of money it did come from potentially helpful strategic partners including Hambrecht & Quist, Infospace.com, Vignette Corporation, and Scripps Ventures. iSyndicate boasts 169,000 Websites, although it offers a fair amount of content to subscriber sites for free. By contrast, Screaming Media claims 530 Web site customers and 119 content providers.

Screaming Media is the first high profile Silicon Alley project for Jay Chiat, the former ad exec turned high profile Silicon Alley angel investor. Chiat loaned Screaming Media $250,000 a little over a year ago and served as interim chief executive officer of the company before Screaming Media hired new CEO Kevin Clark last November. The debt was ultimately converted into stock. Before the IPO Chiat holds just over 10 percent of the company. Company co-founder Alan Ellman is the largest shareholder with 16.6 percent of the company still in his hands.