• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 12, 2007

Morris Communcations, which publishes 27 daily newspapers, confirmed Thursday that it has joined the consortium of newspapers using Yahoo's HotJobs to power their online career sections.

Yahoo now has agreements to power online job ads for 215 newspapers. The program launched last November with around 175 newspapers, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Eventually, the deal is expected to extend beyond online job sites to other types of advertising and content-sharing, such as incorporating Yahoo search and mapping into newspapers' sites and distributing newspaper content through Yahoo search, news, and other sections of the portal. At least eight of the Morris daily papers previously were affiliated with CareerBuilder, according to consultancy Classified Intelligence.

The deal comes as newspaper industry struggles to boost online ad revenue--which has been growing quickly, but still accounts for a small proportion of overall revenue. In addition to the deals with online classifieds sites, dozens of newspapers have tapped Google to sell unused print inventory. The roster of publishers in that program include Gannett, the Tribune Co., The New York Times Co., the Washington Post Co., Hearst and the Journal Register Co.

In addition, Gannett, McClatchy, and Tribune plan to pool around 10% of their inventory and offer marketers the ability to buy online ads across their properties with just one media buy, according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.