The Yahoo/Newspaper Deal

A newspaper consortium of a dozen companies, jointly owning 250 newspapers, has just announced a deal with Yahoo to share advertising and editorial content online. According to this article,
2006 was the first year in which newspaper companies during a period of
economic growth and the losses have only grown in 2007. The papers, facing abandonment by both readers and advertisers want to bring more traffic to their websites so they can offer national advertisers a one-stop-shop for advertising with multiple newspapers online. In turn, Yahoo will gain access to the local content and the advertising sales forces of the papers. The terms of the agreement call for Yahoo placing prominent links to the papers on their main section pages like Yahoo Sports or Yahoo Finance and the papers have agreed to integrate Yahoo’s search engine on their websites.

This is certainly the topic du jour, especially considering the recent layoffs at the Tampa Tribune, one of Tampa’s top local papers. In fact, I was a panelist today discussing this very subject. The panel was at the Florida Scholastic Press Association conference and the focus of the panel was "Blogging and How it Shapes Journalism."  A lot of discussion took place regarding newspapers’ recent transition from print media to more online content. One of my fellow panelists, Patty Kim from the Tampa Tribune, is in the midst of watching the old media powerhouse of the Tribune struggle to adapt to the new, online world. The other panelists included Tommy Duncan of Sticks of Fire, a well-known Tampa blog, and Eric Deggans from the Times.