Yahoo, which recently lost Dan Finnegan, the catalyst at its newspaper classifieds project, has now hired Jeff Kinder to replace him. Kinder is charged with heading up all Yahoo HotJobs business, including sales, product, marketing and engineering…this was disclosed yesterday at the Deutsche Bank Media and Telecommunications Conference, reported on by ClickZ. Kinder recently served as SVP for Cendant Corp., a company that includes Orbitz, CheapTickets, Avis, and Century 21.

Meanwhile Hearst, one of the first to joint the newspaper consortium, is making a concerted effort to promote the service to advertisers, said Lincoln Millstein, SVP digital media for Hearst Newspapers, at the conference. Hearst’s newspaper division started selling this in December and “The newspaper division is already for the first six months of this year realizing revenues well into the seven digits… and remember, most of this revenue has extremely high profitability,” he said.

Recently, SVP of Yahoo’s Marketplaces unit Hilary Schneider said at an NAA conference that integration of partner news content and headlines across Yahoo, within Local, Autos, MyYahoo, Mail, and other sections of the portal will begin soon. The search monetization piece will roll out “in the back half of this year,” said Schneider. Further down the road in 2008, Yahoo expects to use its Panama platform to serve display ads on the paper sites.