Yahoo! has announced the formation of a major "consortium" in alliance with seven newspapers to tap into the local advertising market. The newspapers involved are Cox Enterprises, Belo, E. W. Scripps, the Journal Register Company, Lee Enterprises and Hearst. The last one has a running partnership with Google to run the latter's text ads in Hearst print publications.

One of the biggest partners in the alliance is MediaNews Group, publisher of The Denver Post and The Detroit News. According to its Vice Chairman and CEO Dean Singleton "a huge sales force involving thousands of sales professionals" will sell ads on behalf of the alliance. He also said that "We expect to drive new and larger audiences to each of our newspaper online sites."

While the deal will provide the newspapers with "access to Yahoo's expanding local audiences which include desirable younger audiences," Yahoo! profits by a wider audience for its local content, maps and ads. Yahoo! also benefits by access to locally relevant content.

The integration will display Yahoo!'s hot product HotJobs classifieds across the newspapaer sites and in return HotJobs section will include the newspaper ads. For users and advertisers it now means that they will have to do with a single platform.

The deal is set to up the ante with Google already in partnership with more than 50 newspaper partners including The New York Times, The Washington Post.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!