One page/post content as two separate “publish units”

I am hacking my seventh WP into a corporate CMS website.
Most requirements are dev/spec’d/done, but I keep banging my head around a specific need :

In WP, each page is a “publish unit”. Drop “the_content” in the right template file, and it works.

What I need, is the ability for an user to publish a page with two distinct – but linked – “publish units” which could be displayed independtly on the page.

The typical application for this is to have a “news” page published, about a new partnership with another company :

– the main content would be the news / press release in itself
– the “aside” / additionnal content would be some info about the other company (logo, ‘about them’, link to their website).

See what I mean ?

I am keeping myself from oscommerce-style hacking (adding a field in the WP database, push a new textarea in the writing admin page, etc.), but won’t resist much longer ??

Others ways I’ve think about:

adding a <- blockquote -> content at the end of the page content, the blockquote being “moved” by CSS to the side of the page (cons : need the end-user to add a html tag / and no simple way for the template file to “know” if there is an aside content in the page)

using the_excerpt, the main content could be in the_content() and the aside in the_excerpt. not pretty, but why not … ?