Ed Board realizes that people don’t usually accuse newspapers (except for this one, of course) of being cutting edge.

Maybe that’s why the deal struck last week between Yahoo! and 176 daily newspapers across the country flew under the radar of so many news outlets. After all, people want to stay up on what news corporations are up to, right?

Okay, maybe not so much. But with a deal like this and its implications, people should start caring.

In case you missed it, seven major newspaper-owning corporations signed a deal last week to coordinate Hot Jobs and the papers’ classified-ad systems.

As always, though, Google was the first kid on the block, signing a deal earlier this month with several major papers, The New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post among them, to place some of its advertising in their papers.

The newspaper industry is taking steps, albeit baby ones, toward building a cross-platform ad structure. The boost classified ads will get from the Google and Yahoo deals will probably be minimal, but it’s the direction the papers are headed that’s so important. A partnership with Yahoo could lead to localized news story searches and targeted advertising for local audiences, something the online behemoth has been missing that newspapers could provide. The search engine, for its part, could lend its massive audiences and corporate name.

This could be part of a solution to keeping newspapers alive without whoring themselves out to fickle public tastes. The proverbial sky has been falling for print media ever since the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates demonstrated the power of television. (For those of you not up to speed on past presidential races: the public, which watched the debates on television, saw Nixon in sweaty shambles and gave a decided edge to Kennedy. Radio listeners, however, thought Nixon won soundly. Thus began the battle of the television sound bites.)

With the advent of the Internet, though, it seemed people really started losing faith in your average ink-stained wretch. If you didn’t hop on board, you were only delaying the inevitable – and the death of newspapers (much to the chagrin of print journalism majors everywhere) was supposedly certain.

But newspapers were assumed to be dinosaurs, incapable of adapting to compete with the younger, faster Web. Some still accuse print journalism of not having a proper sense of urgency; they say this deal is too little too late.

Ed Board kindly reminds those people of the too-much-too-soon disaster that was the AOL TimeWarner merger. When you’re the sole in-depth source of much local news, you’ve got a responsibility to be a little conservative and make sure you stick around.

So kudos to newspapers for breaking the ice. And for the readers out there: keep your eyes peeled. There are a lot of interesting changes in the media afoot, and we’d sure hate for you to miss them.