Did Yahoo! pull a fast one on the papers?

Yahoo!, which is the primary reason a host of newspapers formed an entity known as the Newspaper Consortium a few years back, is making some moves that analysts rightly indicate should cause the newspapers some indigestion.

They've struck a deal with AT&T to use the phone company's local sales force to sell ads on Yahoo's ad platform known as APT.  That platform was built with the papers and designed so papers could sell behaviorally-targeted ads to local customers on their sites and on Yahoo as well.  What happens when AT&T releases its thousands of sales people start to make local sales calls too?

Ken Doctor, at Outsell Insights has some excellent perspective (you have to register but it's worth it):

Outsell believes the week's developments should simply serve as a strong reminder to newspaper companies about nature of partnering in the digital world. Today's partner may be tomorrow's competitor, and vice versa. That means corporate development and business development need to be strengthened, ongoing high-level efforts to find, manage, measure, optimize, and sometimes replace the many web alliances that are key to success.