Can Yahoo Save America's Newspapers?

In a little under a year and a half, Yahoo's alliance with newspapers has expanded to include roughly a third of all daily newspapers in the U.S.

One key engine of this growth is Yahoo's HotJobs platform, which appears as co-branded sites and sections with its newspaper partners. The consortium reports 50 percent year-over-year traffic growth on HotJobs sites, helping it to surpass Monster.com.

But another major potential source of shared revenue --- advertising --- apparently has been slower to develop. That's not surprising because integrating and coordinating sales teams and strategies in the media industry is notoriously difficult.

And, whereas Yahoo is a powerful global brand, newspapers typically have strong local and regional brands, with the types of advertising base that secures those markets.

But Yahoo now says the "first phase" of the partnered advertising effort has now begun, and the resulting cross-promotion should yield greater cross-sales in the months to come.

"We are getting lots of positive feedback from the newspaper publishers," says Yahoo's Emily Fox. "They are trying lots of different things to play the game in these changing times, and this is one of the options that is working very well both for them and for us."

The 900-pound gorilla hovering over this, and all of Yahoo's efforts, of course, is Microsoft. As has previously been noted in this space, the cultural differences between these two Internet players include their attitudes toward quality journalism content.

Where Yahoo has pursued partnerships such as the consortium with newspapers, thereby holding out hope that a troubled industry that provides a vital public service can survive its difficult transition to the digital format and away from paper, Microsoft has shown no such interest in the future of journalism.

This is one under-reported aspect of the proposed takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft that federal regulators should take a closer look at. To put an exclamation on it, there's more -- much more -- at stake here than the fate of Yahoo!