The Chronicle, Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and the other chain-owned dailies in the Bay Area are apart of an advertising partnership with Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, according to numerous media reports. The partnership will let newspaper advertisers place recruitment ads on Yahoo’s HotJobs site and in return Yahoo will provide search software for newspaper Web sites and distribute their stories.

“Newspapers never jumped into technology with both feet,” Andrew Swinand, president of Chicago-based Starcom Worldwide, a media-consulting firm, told Bloomberg News. “What newspapers have is local advertising relationships that a company like Yahoo cannot match.”

“Newspapers are essentially saying, ‘We haven’t done a great job moving online, and therefore, we can’t do this on our own,'” UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter said. “Yahoo sees itself more as a media company than Google, so it makes sense they were able to do this.”

MediaNews, owner of the most of the dailies in the Bay Area, is a partner along with Chronicle owner Hearst Corp. and several other newspaper chains. The country’s two largest newspaper publishers, Gannett Co. and Tribune Co., aren’t taking part. Along with McClatchy Co., the three companies jointly own CareerBuilder.com, the country’s largest help-wanted Web site.

Google earlier this month announced a test of advertising sales for 50 newspapers. The Mountain View, California-based company is taking bids for advertising space in newspapers owned by New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Gannett, Tribune and McClatchy.

Yahoo’s willingness to help the Chinese government prosecute journalists apparently did not play any role in the decision by the newspaper companies, or at least it wasn’t mentioned in any of their stories about the Yahoo partnership.