176 Newspapers - Yahoo! Partnership

Today, New York Times announced that Yahoo made a partnership with 176 newspapers "to share content, advertising and technology, another sign that the wary newspaper business is increasingly willing to shake hands with the technology companies they once saw as a threat.

In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo's classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads. 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. "

"There has been a big question asked for a while as to how newspapers will navigate the online future. I think this is the answer to that question," said William Dean Singleton, vice chairman and chief executive of MediaNews Group, a member of the partnership.

"The agreement plays right into the strategy of wanting to be the largest and most comprehensive ad platform out there. We believe that the way to achieve that objective is to partner with great brands," Sue Decker, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Yahoo sustained.

It seems like the biggest online companies in the world are planning to expand their advertising strategies to newspapers and offline products. It is quite a good idea only in the big countries where the Internet is accessible to the majority of citizens.