The layoffs could be announced next Tuesday, when Yahoo reports its first-quarter financial results, according to the source, who wished to remain anonymous because of the issue’s sensitivity.

Yahoo’s last round of layoffs was in December, under former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang. The company, which is the No. 2 U.S. Internet search provider, finished 2008 with roughly 13,600 employees, down by more than 1,600 employees from the third quarter of 2008.

Yahoo declined to comment on the planned layoffs, first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday.

The cuts would come almost two months after Bartz implemented a broad internal management reorganization and as Yahoo explores partnerships to help revive its growth.

Yahoo and Microsoft Corp met recently to discuss a deal involving the company’s search business, according to a source familiar with the matter who wished to remain anonymous.

The search company has projected that sales in the first quarter could be down as much as 16 percent at $1.53 billion.

Shares of Yahoo were up 3 cents at $14.10 in after hours trade.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Bartz suggested Yahoo might seek to partner with social networking companies rather than build its own products in this area.

“I do not believe we can invent the next Facebook,” Bartz said.

“It is very clear we have to do that,” she said in response to a question about her thoughts on the tremendous growth of social networks like privately held Facebook and Twitter.

Bartz repeated her philosophy that every business in Yahoo is up for examination as the company seeks to revive growth and better compete with Google Inc.

While she opened the door to negotiations with Microsoft Corp about a search partnership, she stressed the importance of search data to Yahoo’s advertising customers.

If Yahoo and Microsoft decided to talk about a search deal, “We’re going to negotiate as companies negotiate, privately.” Bartz said.

The comments come a week after Bartz unveiled a major management reorganization. Investors are waiting to see if the new CEO can restart deal talks with Microsoft.

Last year, Microsoft made an unsuccessful bid to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion or $33 per share. The software company has said it is no longer interested in buying all of Yahoo but remains open to a search deal.

Bartz flagged Yahoo’s Web-based email product, as well as its news and front-door businesses as “core” Yahoo properties. She also said the company needs to be “running very tight fiscally.”

The CEO indicated that Yahoo is considering various strategies to strengthen its position in important markets, including mergers and acquisitions. She said the company could pursue acquisitions or partnerships to grow its footprint in Europe.

Bartz, who took the reins six weeks ago, announced the changes in a blog post on Thursday, as well as in an e-mail to Yahoo employees.

“Today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo a lot faster on its feet,” Bartz wrote on the corporate blog. “We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer.”

Yahoo’s technology and product groups will be combined into one entity led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, according to Bartz’s email to employees.

The company, which lags far behind Internet search leader Google Inc, has initiated a search for a new CFO, and Jorgensen will remain through a transition period, Yahoo said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

Jorgensen is the latest executive to depart in recent weeks. Neeraj Khemlani, head of Yahoo’s news and information group, and Jill Nash, chief communications officer, have also left the company.

Bartz said in the memo to employees that Marco Boerries, head of the company’s Connected Life group, has also resigned. The Connected Life group, which focused on bringing Yahoo products to mobile devices, will be integrated into various parts of the new organization.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company would not provide any official announcement on the reorganization, other than Bartz’s blog post, calling it an internal matter.

Yahoo shares were up 5.3 percent at $13.14 on Nasdaq. They had risen as much as 7.3 percent earlier in the day on Jorgensen’s comments at a technology conference on Wednesday that indicated the company was open to a sale of its search business.

Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.

The new services include targeting graphical adverts to users who have searched for particular terms in Yahoo’s search engine and customizing the offers in adverts based on what websites a consumer has visited and what they have done on those sites, the paper said.

Another service that is expected to go live next month will allow marketers to buy text adverts next to search results that are targeted to users during a certain time of day or based on factors such as their age and gender, according to the paper.

“Targeting a site with a couple hundred thousand users…I don’t call that targeting. I call that wasted effort,” the paper quoted Joanne Bradford, Yahoo’s senior vice president of U.S. revenue and market development, as saying. “Size does matter.”

Bradford and Michael Walrath, a senior vice president at Yahoo, will discuss the new features during a keynote address at a conference in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday, the paper said.

They will also use the speech to urge marketers to stop thinking about search and display advertising as separate products and to take advantage of tools such as Yahoo’s search-targeting product to bridge the two, the pair told the paper in a joint interview.

Hearst said on Monday that Neeraj Khemlani will join the newspaper and magazine publisher in March as vice president and special assistant to the chief executive for digital media.

Khemlani will report directly to Hearst CEO Frank Bennack Jr., and be responsible for promoting and coordinating “digital content transformation” across Hearst, which owns 16 daily newspapers and more than 200 magazines, including Esquire and Cosmopolitan.

His departure from Yahoo comes as the No. 2 Internet search company is expected to soon unveil a broad reshuffling of its management structure under Carol Bartz, who took the reins as CEO in January.

Bartz, in her weekly memo to staff on Friday, told employees to rest up as the coming week would be “a biggie.” The AllThingsDigital blog said a reorganization could be announced as early as Wednesday.

Khemlani, a former producer for CBS News’ 60 Minutes program, was considered a likely candidate to head up one of Yahoo’s three key divisions within the media group under the new organization structure, according to the blog.

A Yahoo representative was not immediately available for comment.

Yahoo’s stock was down 6 cents at $12.08 in afternoon trade on the Nasdaq.

The Wall Street Journal-affiliated blog, citing several sources inside and outside the Internet company, said the shift could be pushed out a week or two or rolled out in pieces.

The blog cited a February 20 Bartz memo to employees, in which she said, “Get well-rested, because next week’s a biggie.”

Yahoo officials declined to comment.

Yahoo, the leading provider of online display advertising, has been under pressure for nearly a year as it held fruitless merger or partnership talks with Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Time Warner Inc’s AOL.

During that time, Yahoo lost market share in search advertising, while display ad sales have been badly hit industrywide by the U.S. recession.

The reorganization is expected to include a set-up where executives like chief operating officer, chief technology officer and a new, more powerful chief marketing officer all report to Bartz, the blog said.

In addition, several sources suggested Bartz may abandon a recent restructuring that split the world into four operating regions, the blog said. Instead, one executive could head the United States and a second head up all international efforts.

Yahoo Mobile will launch at the end of March in a form downloadable to any phone with a Web browser and from May in custom versions for hundreds of smartphones.

“There is a growing number of consumers out there who are not Apple iPhone users but want a rich starting experience,” Marco Boerries, the head of Yahoo’s mobile division, told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo will also launch a version of Yahoo Mobile, designed to be a starting point for users to access the Internet, for the iPhone itself at the end of March. A test version for a limited number of public users is going live this week.

Users also have the option to easily add any software or Web sites they choose to download on their phones.

The company plans in coming months to promote Yahoo Mobile via a series of 70 major operator partnerships it has struck to reach 850 million mobile subscribers around the globe.

Fifty of those partnerships already offer Yahoo services and the company expects the rest to adopt Yahoo Mobile in coming months, Boerries said.

Yahoo has developed versions that work on hundreds of mid-range and high-end mobile phones from BlackBerry maker RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Motorola, as well as phones running Microsoft Windows.

Boerries defines the universe of phones that can effectively run Yahoo Mobile as “every phone that’s shipped in the last two years that has a decent HTML-capable browser.” He added: “We don’t want to make lowest common denominator stuff.”

A more general version of the service downloadable from the Web will also work on older phones but will not be tailored to those phones’ specifications. Boerries demonstrated it on an old Sony Ericsson model.

Boerries said last year’s on-again off-again talks with would-be buyer Microsoft had not significantly distracted his team, and said he had kept his key staff together for years.

After some prior delays in introducing services such as Yahoo Go, Boerries professed relief that his fuller vision of putting the Web on phones had arrived on time: “It is really, for me, making it all come together.