Yahoo! Hits Belo the Belt Clip

In a signal to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) that it, too, can play the clip-culture game, Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) is teaming up with media giant Belo (NYSE: BLC) to offer local news videos on its site.

Apart from Belo's collection of daily newspapers, the company also owns 20 different television stations. Thirteen of those stations will now provide Yahoo! News with breaking video from their news departments to beef up the localized pages on Yahoo!. Both companies will share in the resulting ad revenue.

It's not the first time that Yahoo! and Belo have warmed up to one another. Belo was one of the first companies to join the consortium of newspapers that are combining their local employment classifieds with Yahoo! HotJobs.

The deal with Belo now finds Yahoo! providing local news video segments in 18 of the country's 25 largest metropolitan markets. It's a win-win arrangement, of course. Yahoo! gets to beef up its content offerings. Belo gets the ambassadorial benefits of having its local networks and reporters featured on Yahoo!. The ad revenue, even if it's minimal, will be gravy.

Yahoo!'s growing relationship with old-school media companies like McClatchy (NYSE: MNI), E.W. Scripps (NYSE: SSP), and Lee Enterprises (NYSE: LEE) is refreshing. They may all be struggling at the moment -- Yahoo! included -- but they recognize that there's strength in numbers. 

This move is also the right approach. Google has approached media giants like Time Warner's (NYSE: TWX) CNN with deals to populate CNN.com with Google's paid search ads. That's nice, but incomplete. Yahoo! is approaching the old-school media empires with solutions that make more sense, applying its content resources toward a Web-friendly future.

Will Yahoo! be rewarded for its forward-thinking mettle? Tune in and watch. Film at eleven.

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