The New York Times takes an interesting look at how newspapers like The Houston Chronicle and Yellow Pages publishers like Bellsouth and SBC Communications have recently become Google and Yahoo adword resellers, leveraging their existing sales relationships with small & medium business owners.
You can see why the search engines would be happy with such a partnership given how expensive and time consuming account managing millions of low value business advertisers would be. But from the newspaper perspective, you have to wonder whether they will learn the game fast enough before their portal partners begin stealing the food from their plates.