“I'm just saying that (Yahoo is) a big company with lots of things going on,” San Francisco-based consultant Alan Mutter, managing partner of Tapit Partners, told E&P. “The newspaper initiative is just one of many – and not one of the leading lines of business.”

But if Microsoft's unwelcome US$44.6 billion bid is distracting Yahoo from its newspaper consortium ad network, which involves more than 600 U.S. newspapers, the distraction is happening in higher levels of management, not with programmers, said Gregory Schermer, vice president of interactive media at Lee Enterprises, according to E&P.

William Singleton, CEO of MediaNews Group, said he doesn't think Yahoo is being distracted at all.

“Yahoo has 572 people working full time on newspaper consortium projects, and we were told that number could exceed 700 in the next few months,” Singleton told E&P.

Jay Smith, president of Cox Newspapers, said he was worried about the alliance, due to the challenges newspapers are facing, coupled with the buyout talk that Yahoo is dealing with. Smith said that after a meeting at Yahoo in early February, however, the level of commitment from top executives at Yahoo allayed his fears, and told E&P that “The premise behind our relationship with Yahoo is such that it will last.”

“In the worst-case scenario, what if Microsoft decides it doesn't want to help newspapers anymore? What if they go 12 months down the line, and say, 'We don't want to do anything with you anymore?'” said Mutter, according to E&P.