A consortium of seven newspaper chains representing 176 daily papers across the country is announcing a broad partnership with Yahoo to share content, advertising and technology. In the first phase of the deal, the newspaper companies will begin posting their employment classified ads on Yahoo’s classified jobs site, HotJobs, and start using HotJobs technology to run their own online career ads.

But the long-term goal of the alliance with Yahoo, according to one senior executive at a participating newspaper company, is to be able to have the content of these newspapers tagged and optimized for searching and indexing by Yahoo. In that way, local news — one of the pillars of the newspaper business — would become part of a large information network that would increase usefulness for readers and value to advertisers.

The consortium includes the MediaNews Group, Hearst, Belo, E. W. Scripps, the Journal Register Company, Lee Enterprises and Cox Enterprises. The group owns newspapers in 38 states, among them major metropolitan dailies including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Denver Post, with a combined daily circulation of 12 million.

During the next year, the partnership will be extended as newspapers begin displaying their news articles and local ads on Yahoo’s online network. Yahoo, in turn, will make available local event listings, maps, search technology and other content and tools on the newspapers’ Web sites. Yahoo will also use its technology to help newspaper sell online ads.

Despite its position as the No. 1 online destination, with some 131 million users in the United States and 400 million worldwide, Yahoo has struggled with many problems in recent months. In particular, it has faltered in its competition with Google as a search engine, and has been challenged by the growing popularity of sites like MySpace, which offer an inexpensive way for advertisers to reach a broad audience. Yahoo shares are down more than 30 percent this year.

Yahoo executives emphasized the importance of the local and classified advertising market, which they said is expected to grow to $12.4 billion by 2010, from $3.4 billion this year. “There is significant opportunity to materially grow local advertising,” said Hilary Schneider, a former executive for Knight Ridder who recently joined Yahoo as senior vice president for marketplaces.