The Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium continues to expand, adding 94 more U.S. papers from a variety of publishers including the Sun-Times News Group, Black Press, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Stephens Media Group. The announcement ballyhoos the quadrupling of the consortium to 779 papers since its launch in late 2006 and tosses in a few more stats but offers precious little about the actual results. We’ve heard dribs and drabs during various earnings calls from newspaper companies eager to show online progress, but we’ve also picked up some mutterings that some partners aren’t seeing hoped-for gains. In the absence of hard data, it’s hard for us to tell but we’ll keep at it. From the release:

—50-plus papers are trialing the sale of DMA-targeted Yahoo inventory to local advertisers.
—More than 600 papers exclusively use Yahoo HotJobs, the original reason for the consortium’s creation. A far smaller number—not quite 150—are using Yahoo Search.
—Newspapers’ sites are averaging 10 million-plus referrals monthly through distribution of their headlines across Yahoo News and services.

Meanwhile, Yahoo’s rash of announcements today also included word of an online circular program mixing Yahoo Smart Ads with content from ShopLocal to produce localized circulars similar to those usually in newspapers on Sundays.

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