weeks - 6:15 pm on Aug 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

“My fortunes are tied to my pages,” Ms. Bartz said.

I'm not sure how many people here are aware of Yahoo's agreement with most of the major US newspaper chains. In the newspaper biz, it's a big deal. One chain, Hearst, is working the Yahoo ad deal as a major profit driver for their corporation. (And, they are making millions with it, too.)

The deal is that Yahoo selling national ads for newspaper web sites and the newspapers sells local ads for Yahoo. It sounds great. In practice, if you try to buy ads (as I have) it's awkward and time consuming. Recently, Yahoo has a service where it's easy to buy local ads on Yahoo bypassing their newspaper partners.

One of the big appeals of this package for newspapers was the newspapers could sell local ads on Yahoo search results. So, the agreement with Bing could be a great thing for the newspapers, or another waste of time, depending on how it works out.

But, if I were a publisher (someone who makes "pages" and sells them) and I read Yahoo's new CEO was saying, "My fortunes are tied to my pages," I'd be asking some questions.

Poor newspapers. They can not get a break.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I--for one--thought Yahoo was a major player in online search. Silly me.