Several newspapers have signed a deal for a news aggregator to provide them with links to stories from other publishers that the newspapers will then run alongside or in their own stories.

Newspapers have been skittish about linking to external sites, let alone those of competitors, but the realities of having to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo for news readers, as well as for their fair share of online advertising, have apparently compelled at least some of them to change their approach. The Washington Post, The New York Sun and The Daily Oklahoma have contracted with Inform.com to scan news sites and blogs and provide related-content links to articles appearing on the papers' sites, reports the New York Times.

"This lets us be a search engine," Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia for Opubco Communications Group, publisher of the Oklahoman and its NewsOK.com, is quoted as saying. "People aren't just reading one story," she said. "They'll click deeper because of this, and I can load ads deeper into those pages. It really beefs up the site." She said she expects the number of pageviews on the site to increase at least threefold.

Privately held Inform, based in New York, says it was able to convince publishers to try its linking service because they had already figured out that linking to related content was beneficial but had no way to automate the process.