It’s not as big as last week’s short-lived rumor about a merger with Yahoo, but Microsoft has in fact purchased a minority equity stake in jobs-site CareerBuilder.com. Microsoft becomes the first non-newspaper co-owner of Careerbuilder, joining its other parents Gannett, Tribune Company and The McClatchy Company. Terms were not disclosed. In a separate agreement, MSN and CareerBuilder have extended their three-year-old strategic alliance as well. CareerBuilder will be the exclusive content provider to the MSN Careers channel in the U.S. through 2013. Under that agreement, CareerBuilder will pay MSN up to $443 million over the course of seven years to serve as MSN Careers’ exclusive job search engine. MSN and CareerBuilder have also extended the partnership to include some MSN international sites. Release
Updated Rafat adds: ChicagoTrib cites sources and says that the stake is 4 percent. This leaves Tribune and Gannett each with stakes of 40.8 percent and McClatchy with 14.4 percent of the Internet site. Based on last August’s CareerBuilder’s valuation of $1.55 billion, MSFT’s stake could have been around $60-70 million.

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