As we have written about before in this blog, Yahoo's deal with newspapers giving them the right to sell digital display ads on Yahoo to newspaper customers, has always seemed like a much better deal for Yahoo than it was for the newspapers but it just got much worse. 

PaidContent has this story today on Yahoo's new partnership with AT&T, which gives presumably yellow page salespeople the same selling privileges as newspaper salespeople. Therefore, any attempt by newspapers to use the Yahoo network as an added value to a print buy has just become very difficult to do. If I were involved with a newspaper association or trade group and I had a pulse, I would be looking around for a new partner.

Here is part of the story from PaidContent:

AT&T’s 5,000-strong sales force will begin to sell Yahoo’s display inventory in local ad markets starting later this summer, under a new partnership the two companies announced Tuesday. During Yahoo’s earnings call, CEO Carol Bartz boasted that the relationship means that Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) will now have 13,000 local ad sales reps located across the United States. But the partnership could create new competition for many of Yahoo’s existing reps who work for members of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, since there is likely to be overlap between the local businesses the two groups will sell to. In an interview with ClickZ, Yahoo SVP Jim Schinella dismisses those concerns saying that newspaper and directory companies have long competed in the same markets and they “naturally gravitate toward different business partners.”