Media General Joins Yahoo Paper Gang

Media General, publisher of 22 daily southern papers including The Tampa Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch has joined Yahoo’s so-called “consortium” of paper publisher partners. Through the arrangement, Media General’s job classifieds will be entered into the Yahoo HotJobs database. The publisher has been using HotJobs to run its online job ads for The Tampa Tribune for over a year.

If this were just a job classifieds play, it wouldn’t seem like the bigger deal it is. The goal for Yahoo is to build a classifieds network of sorts, starting with recruitment ads and moving on from there. Yahoo anticipates distributing its tools and apps (maps and local biz and event listings) out to the newspaper partner sites, meanwhile, integrating the papers’ content throughout its site.

Media General joins seven other paper publishers in the consortium, now totaling over 200 papers.