Cheezhead

Yahoo! HotJobs is touting a new deal that adds four publishers to their newspaper consortium and expands their network to encompass “one-third of the newspapers in the U.S.”

The additions include Shaw Newspapers and its 25 daily and weekly newspapers covering northern Illinois and Iowa, The Buffalo News and its paper that covers Buffalo, NY, the Times Publishing Company that produces The Erie Times News in Erie, PA, and the Columbian Publishing Company that publishes The Columbian in Vancouver, WA.

This brings the network to 634 participating newspapers, 425 of which are dailies – 30 percent of all U.S. daily newspapers and 37 percent of all U.S. Sunday circulation. Says Lem Lloyd, vice president, Newspaper Consortium for Yahoo!,

Yahoo!’s continued momentum with the newspaper industry shows that current and new Consortium members value the opportunity to combine the newspapers’ own unmatched local news and deep local advertising relationships with Yahoo!’s leading technologies and extensive online audience. We’ve already seen tremendous growth and have captured valuable local audience share across every major U.S. region through integration with Yahoo! HotJobs and the newspaper partners.

No one’s going to mistake The Erie Times for the Chicago Tribune, but when looking for reasons behind HotJobs’ traffic growth, the newspaper partnerships have to be front and center. Latest comScore data was highlighted as well, keeping CareerBuilder No. 1 with 24.8 million visits, followed by HotJobs with 17.4 million and Monster with 17.1 million.

Through partnerships and acquisitions, the push for local markets continues in earnest, separated by two distinct strategies: Newspaper properties vs. local niche job boards.