Will botched newspaper deal lead to Sue Decker&#39;s ouster?

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:

I was reading the Yahoo Newspaper posting on your site. You are spot on, I have been working with a bunch of the newspapers. Man - yahoo is dying - will they ever recover? I was meeting today with [a major newspaper chain] - their GM and their whole ad sales team. They were talking about how the Yahoo Newspaper deal has not moved and they figure it will be live in 08, though they have not seen anything yet, and they are not sure if Yahoo is even working on it. The one lead woman said 'the Yahoo newspaper deal is like Panama 2.0 - a total cluster'.

Is it just me, or do you think that there is a guy at Yahoo that has 'build the Yahoo newspaper system' in his Franklin Planner, but has a priority C against it so he won't start working on it until a day before it is due. He will try and do an all nighter, but because he is too old and one of the few left at Yahoo, he will give up at 8pm and go home to watch Dancing With The Stars. ;)

Panama is Yahoo's new advertising technology, meant to bolster it in competition with Google. But Panama was late — a technical failure that helped lead to Terry Semel's ouster as CEO. If the Yahoo newspaper deal is, as the newspaper executive suggests, "Panama 2.0," could it likewise bring down Decker?