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SAN FRANCISCO -- Newspaper publishers, including MediaNews Group Inc. and the Hearst Corp., are negotiating with Yahoo Inc. to share online content in such areas as local news and classified advertising, according to a published report on Friday.
The article, in BusinessWeek magazine, said that the deal being discussed would give the news companies a greater presence on the Sunnyvale, Calif., Web portal and help drive traffic to Yahoo's employment listings site, HotJobs. In return, Yahoo would give the news companies a cut of the revenue from the ads placed around news articles that appear on Yahoo.
If consummated, the partnership would significantly increase cooperation between the stalwarts of old and new media, which until now have an uneasy coexistence.
Newspapers already provide articles to Yahoo, but they don't generally share the advertising revenue they generate.
Furthermore, Yahoo is the Web's most popular news destination and potentially detours users from visiting the newspaper Web sites directly.
Hearst, which owns The Chronicle, declined to comment about any negotiations. Phone calls to MediaNews and Yahoo were not returned.
But Jody Ludovic, president of MediaNews, acknowledged in an interview with the Associated Press that exploratory talks are continuing among various newspaper publishers to expand their cooperation with Yahoo, beginning with classified job ads. If successful, the discussions could expand to include local search and other kinds of classified advertising such as real estate and autos, he said.
Discussions are also taking place with online job boards Monster.com and CareerBuilder, according to BusinessWeek.
Executives from Hearst and MediaNews are reportedly spearheading the discussions, which began in October. Other newspaper companies are also involved.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the involvement of Hearst and MediaNews was linked to their recent alliance, formed in the aftermath of a complex deal by MediaNews to buy several Bay Area newspapers including the San Jose Mercury News. Hearst became an investor in MediaNews after the acquisition, and the two companies have said they plan to work together on various projects.
As their circulations tumble, newspapers are trying to bolster online readership and capitalize on the growing Internet advertising market. They face hurdles, however.
Classified advertising, once a lucrative business in print, has eroded in the face of competition by online classifieds giant Craigslist, in San Francisco.
Greg Sterling, an analyst for Sterling Market Intelligence, a market research firm focused on local advertising, said that newspaper publishers could make their online classifieds more attractive by offering advertisers a bigger audience through a network. A deal with Yahoo could allow advertisers to post listings simultaneously on the newspaper Web site and on Yahoo, for example.
"The issue is how do you get more eyeballs to those advertisers," Sterling said.
c.2006 San Francisco Chronicle
