Yahoo has announced a partnership with over 150 U.S. newspapers.
But we have a great opportunity to do more, now in concert with our new partners, a consortium of more than 150 U.S. newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Newspapers have always represented and connected local communities and their ability to bring physical communities online is a great complement to the virtual communities Yahoo! brings together.
A New York Timesstory about the deal says it is with a total of 176 newspapers. The long-term goal of the deal is to have Yahoo tag and index the local content from these newspapers and optimize it for searching.
But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo.
In that way, local news - one of the pillars of the newspaper business - would become part of a large information network that would increase usefulness for readers and value to advertisers.
They've also synchronized the newspaper's job listings with Yahoo! HotJobs. Newspaper executives are expected to cut more and more deals as they start focusing more on driving traffic to their newspaper websites and less on the print edition.
