Adam Dell, Michael Dell's younger brother, is a venture capitalist with some successes under his belt, including HotJobs, which Yahoo bought. He'd make a fine Yahoo board member. So why does Carl Icahn feel it necessary to inflate his qualifications? Dell's biography, as supplied by Icahn, claims that Dell "is a contributing columnist to the technology publication, Business 2.0." Not since 2001, in fact, and the magazine itself closed last year.

E.W. Scripps COO Rich Boehne told a conference yesterday that Yahoo's HotJobs.com will account for as much as 5 percent of its newspaper revenues in 2008. That merely confirms what we've heard: The classifieds jobs site is the only part of Yahoo's newspaper consortium that's working. And that's likely because Yahoo bought HotJobs instead of trying to build it. HotJobs isn't the reason why Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, MediaNews, and Cox Newspapers are starting up their own one-stop shop for online advertising — it's the rest of Yahoo's unfulfilled promises. (Photo by Gastev)

Yahoo executives keep touting the company's deal with a "consortium" of newspapers. But from what we hear from insiders, the "consortium" is just a bunch of paper, with no real technology designed to power Yahoo president Sue Decker's grand vision. Newspaper partners are growing increasingly skeptical that Yahoo will ever deliver. No wonder doubts are growing regarding Yahoo's grand alliance. Aside from HotJobs, the job-listings site Yahoo bought which has long partnered with newspapers, what substance is there? An insider's views, after the jump:

Yesterday, during Yahoo's second-quarter earnings call, Sue Decker cited Yahoo's newspaper deal as an example of "how our commitment to being the industry's partner of choice is gaining traction." Her proof? The consortium teaming up with Yahoo now included 17 companies publishing "nearly 400 daily newspapers." Putting together a coalition is one thing; actually making money is quite another altogether. Today, Google announced they are expanding their effort to broker newspaper print ads to more than 225 papers. So is Decker, Yahoo's no. 2 executive, right in touting the number of papers it partners with a a sign of "traction"? It's not that simple. Yahoo doesn't do simple.