Yahoo! and McClatchy Team for Foreign Coverage

I’m late on this, but Yahoo! announced a partnership for foreign news coverage and distribution with McClatchy:

Yahoo! News and The McClatchy Company announced today that they will team up to offer international news coverage from a range of international geographic regions on Yahoo! News. The project, to be called “Trusted Voices,” will offer in-depth perspectives and coverage from McClatchy foreign correspondents based in select regions, including Iraq, the Middle East, China and Latin America. The coverage will include traditional news stories from McClatchy newspapers and will further tap the regional expertise of the correspondents through exclusive blog reports designed to guide readers in understanding the news from these regions.

It’s clearly good for Yahoo! but will it be good for McClatchy? Not yet clear. Is it licensing or a rev share deal? Will McClatchy get branding out of it? I’m sure some.

This is Yahoo! getting in deeper with a traditional newspaper publisher. It’s very interesting from that point of view and in the context of the larger “Amigos” relationship. McClatchy was not involved in that and, of course, McClatchy is one of “The Three” (McClatchy, Tribune, Gannett).

Tribune Co. is about to be sold it appears to billionaire investor Sam Zell. Assuming that goes through, will Tribune become part of the Yahoo! consortium. It’s too soon to tell of course, but interesting to consider how this new media company and “old media” seem to be growing tighter.

Don’t expect Yahoo! to buy a newspaper publisher however. The culture clash and overhead would be undesirable from Yahoo!’s perspective. It’s much better to work via partnerships.