According to the Washington Post, Yahoo continues to woo newspaper publishers into it's online advertising and publishing consortium with the announcement that four more publishers have joined the ranks.  McClatchy, the 3rd largest newspaper company in the country, Media General Inc, Morris Communications Company LLC, and Paddock Publications have all signed on to work with Yahoo's new group.

Back in November we covered the details about the initial creation of this Yahoo+newspaper group.  The first stage of the partnership was to focus around Yahoo's HotJobs employment service.  But as we noted back then, more search and indexing aspects were expected to emerge as the project moved forward.

The new and improved project includes Yahoo-powered search on newspaper websites, syndication of newspaper content on Yahoo News, and Yahoo-powered advertising on newspaper website.  And with the addition of these four new publishers, Yahoo has built an impressive collective of newspaper publishers:

• MediaNews Group Inc
• Hearst Corp
• Belo Corp
• Cox Newspapers
• E.W. Scripps Co
• Lee Enterprises Inc
• Journal Register Co
• McClatchy Co
• Media General Inc
• Morris Communications Co LLC
• Paddock Publications Inc

Notable among those missing are Gannett and Tribune, the number one and two newspaper publishers in the country.  As the Washington Post points out, Gannett and Tribune have been working on their own online advertising platform.  But it would appear that Yahoo has beaten them to the punch.  In fact, McClatchy left Gannett and Tribune behind to join forces with Yahoo.

It should be interesting to see how this works out.  Maybe Gannett and Tribune will ultimately decide to join as well.  Maybe they're too "big" to work with another company.  Who knows.  But suffice it to say, Yahoo has a good thing on their hands here… as long as they don't bungle it up.

And you know that's never certain.