Is Yahoo right fit for newspapers?

MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton and McClatchy’s Gary Pruitt seem optimistic about advertising ties with Yahoo, according to a special report in Editor & Publisher by Jennifer Saba and Mark Fitzgerald.

Headline for the report;

Is Yahoo The Right Fit for Newspapers?

The lead concludes that newspapers “might get squeezed” by Microsoft’s unwelcome big for Yahoo. No matter who wins, the gurus say, the fight will distract Yahoo at a crucial time in the rollout of its next-generation online ad tools for the 600-plus papers in the newspaper consortium.

"I'm just saying that it's a big company with lots of things going on," says San Francisco-based consultant Alan Mutter. "The newspaper initiative is just one of many -- and not one of the leading lines of business."

CEOs in the newspaper consortium say that kind of talk doesn't reflect the reality of Yahoo's efforts.

"Yahoo has 572 people working full time on newspaper consortium projects, and we were told that number could exceed 700 in the next few months," says MediaNews Group CEO William Dean Singleton, interviewed just hours after a two-day meeting of consortium heads at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters. "They are giving it a very determined focus." The alliance keeps growing too. In late February, Yahoo said that four publishers including Shaw Newspapers and The Buffalo (N.Y.) News joined the group.

If the Microsoft bid is disrupting any work -- and that's a big if -- it's happening in Yahoo's executive suites, not at the desktops of programmers, adds Gregory P. Schermer, Lee Enterprises' vice president/ interactive media, who was also at the Sunnyvale meeting held in early February.

McClatchy, for one, is staking future revenue gains on online prospects. During a quarterly earnings call in February, CEO and Chairman Gary Pruitt signaled he expected to see strong double-digit online growth, thanks in part to Yahoo's ad platform and traffic generation, throughout what will sure to prove an otherwise painful 2008.

One attendee, who requested anonymity, told E&P, "If you had seen what I saw, you would be blown away, absolutely blown away."

Click on the headline to read the full report.