Yahoo’s Careers site currently shows identical openings for local editors in San Jose, Chicago and Dallas. The company wants “seasoned” editors in each of those cities to report and write “engaging and exceptional news stories and blog posts from primary or secondary sources on deadline” and source and manage “content from partners.”

SEE ALSO: The Big Portals’ Battle For Local

The openings follow Yahoo’s hiring of former Dallas Morning News new media strategy director Anthony Moor to lead its local news efforts last fall. At the time, Moor said he was being tasked with building a staff of editors around the U.S. who would “improve the local news experience on (the Yahoo) frontpage.” This spring, according to the few posts on his Twitter account, Moor was also looking to hire local editors in New York City and San Francisco—jobs that have likely been filled since the listings have been taken down.

Yahoo’s efforts pale in comparison to that of rival AOL (NYSE: AOL), which has said its Patch network plans to hire a staggering 500 local editors by year-end to cover neighborhoods across the country. But the company appears to be counting on some of its other assets, including Associated Content, to make up the difference. Just today, Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur noted that Yahoo had e-mailed Asociated Content contributors saying it was “looking for writers living in or near the San Francisco area (like you!) to write compelling, local content — ranging from highlights of your favorite neighborhood destinations to metro-wide, first-person reporting assignments covering the stories and topics not typically found in mainstream news media.” Mutter says those chosen will be given “weekly, paid assignments to write articles on SF and their own neighborhoods.”

At our paidContent 2010 conference in February, my colleague Staci D. Kramer asked Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo Americas, what it meant for Yahoo’s partners, including members of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, as Yahoo got increasingly into local news. “The beauty of it is, we do it with our partners,” Schneider responded, adding that content feeds from Consortium members are integrated into the home page as well as other Yahoo sites. But the Associated Content pitch, along with the hiring of local editors, seems to indicate that Yahoo is serious about producing its own original local content too—which could compete with those same partners.

The company’s comment today: “Associated Content is an important platform for generating content across Yahoo!‘s content verticals, and local is one of many areas on Yahoo! that will benefit from our ability to generate high quality content on specific topics.  We are moving quickly to integrate Associated Content into Yahoo!‘s media properties and explore new ways to leverage the contributor community, including local.”