VentureBeat

Yahoo announced a partnership with a consortium of more than 150 newspapers, in an effort to let the struggling newspaper industry find greater distribution for things like their job ads.

Yahoo struck the deal several major newspaper companies, each of which own scores of newspapers, including MediaNews (publisher of Silicon Valley’s Mercury News), Hearst (publisher of the SF Chronicle), and Cox Newspapers.

The Mercury News summary of the deal is here. Note that CareerBuilder, the site the Mercury News and other former Knight Ridder newspapers used for their online advertising is not mentioned anywhere in the news today. That former relationship made sense, because Knight Ridder owned part of CareerBuilder — and so Knight Ridder publications were able to hold on to the customer relationship indirectly, even though the customer ended up at CareerBuilder.

However, when Knight Ridder sold this year, the Mercury News fell to MediaNews. The Yahoo deal means that Yahoo’s job site, HotJobs, has taken over the Merc’s online relationship for jobs. This is unfortunate because it just means more brand confusion. It does nothing to stop employers or prospective job searchers from leaving the Merc, and going to HotJobs, where there are inevitably going to be more jobs. (And we haven’t seen any agreement by HotJobs to not take job listings in the Merc’s territory). Also noteworthy is that Hilary Schneider, a Yahoo vice president helped negotiate the deal, just several months after she left a job where she oversaw these issues at Knight-Ridder.

It’s unclear how this really helps newspapers like the Mercury News, but it’s not clear what alternative they have either.

Tom Mohr ran the online properties of Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper company in the country, until it was sold to McClatchy this year.

He has just written a piece for Editor & Publisher, which is the equivalent of a Clarion call for action for the newspaper industry. The nation’s struggling newspapers desperately need to join forces and form a single company (which he calls “Switzerland Inc.”) to help them survive in the new world. Right now, they’re mired in internal bickering.

It is instructive that after twelve years of the consumer web, not a single example of breakthrough online innovation has emerged out of a newspaper company. Not in recruitment. Not in auto. Not in classifieds. Not in shopping, directory, new ad models, or content aggregation.

We know Tom from our days at the Mercury News, when we talked with him about a possible VentureBeat partnership with Knight Ridder. He was very engaged. This E&P piece is laden with examples, a great summary for those of you in the media industry. In short, old news is getting killed. The truly breakthrough online successes—Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Amazon.com, Monster, eBay, Wikipedia, Shopzilla, etc.—have emerged from teams led by internet-savvy visionaries and loaded with tech DNA .

We bumped into Mohr recently, who told us about his new gigs. He is an “executive in residence” at Charles River Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, which means he helps the firm evaluate new opportunities in the media space, and provide operational advice to firm’s investments in that area. He is also director of the New Media Innovation Lab at Arizona State University.