10 Comments Add your own

• 1. mel taylor  |  October 8th, 2007 at 5:02 am

  One more step towards a day where the local media outlet ultimately becomes just a puppet / affiliate news gatherer for Yahoo or other national aggregator. What to do? Local media needs to develop a local strategy that can thrive, no matter what the national aggregator does. What niche can the local operator profitably serve, without fear of Yahoo or Google infringing on their local efforts/resources/labor ?

• 2. Terry Heaton  |  October 8th, 2007 at 8:07 am

  Interesting, Don, but what local advertising good does Yahoo traffic ultimately serve, if the users are from outside your market? Or are you suggesting otherwise — that this Yahoo traffic is local?

• 3. Rocker  |  October 8th, 2007 at 9:29 am

  Most of it is probably local, as their news page is personalized.

• 4. tdc  |  October 8th, 2007 at 10:05 am

  it probably isn’t local, but just say it is, why the heck would your local audience be going to yahoo to get their local news?

  says alot.

• 5. Rick  |  October 8th, 2007 at 10:56 am

  As for the question of why would an audience be going to Yahoo (or any other national portal) to get local news, my hunch is that it’s a mix of people going to Yahoo for national news (for instance), and seeing the local news already loaded up for them in “My Yahoo.”

  Most people don’t have a “go-to” local site, and even if they do, they’ll click on a headline from a competitor if it seems interesting. Yahoo loads them up and makes it as easy choice for casual readers.

  The beauty of the headline aggregation of Yahoo or Google, etc. is that they cut through the brand loyalty and inertia of readers. It’s all about the quality of the headlines and resulting story, which offers up all sorts of possibilities for sites who can handle it.

  One of the reasons that most cities ended up with one (or maybe two) newspapers is that it was tough to get a subscriber to change from one publication to a rival. The acquisition cost per reader was just brutal.

  It’s much cheaper online, and sites like Yahoo only lower the acquistion cost.

• 6. discreet_chaos  |  October 8th, 2007 at 11:35 am

  I have to agree with Rick about the “why”.

  Yahoo! has been set as my homepage since the mid-90s and I visit Yahoo! News, several times a day. The local headlines are set to preload on my personalized version of news.yahoo and though I have an order which I’d normally go through the local news sites, I also have to say that I don’t normally do it everyday and not only does Yahoo! inform me when I’m not planning to visit, but it also gives me headlines from sources that I’ll normally only visit when they have an exclusive.

  If I were to have any complaint about Yahoo!’s local coverage, it’d be that the cookie sometimes needs to be reset or I’m inadvertently messing with it, when I temporarily go invisible for some reason. Also, I have to say that I prefer Yahoo!’s implementation because though I insert my local zip, it expands to include the whole television market, while CNN’s use of localized Topix headlines seem to rarely change because my smalltown papers only come out twice a week and thankfully my actual town is not normally in the big city headlines.

• 7. tdc  |  October 8th, 2007 at 11:37 am

  shame on any local media company that buys the line “most people don’t have a go-to local site” while doing nothing to change it except splitting THEIR revenue with someone else.

  i hardly think cnn, yahoo, msn or google have a lock on innovation.

  (sorry, rex.) i didn’t know you were the exec. producer until yesterday! wow!

• 8. MSM  |  October 8th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

  Reading Forbes’ rather gushing write-up (”quietly solidified … as number 1″) and Don’s equally uncritical writethrough (”quiet ascension), it’s easy to find some missing facts along with the unchallenged assertions. No mention of the hyped, then dumped, “HotZone” from Yahoo. No mention of the rollup of IB-local traffic into Yahoo News numbers — no small part of the “quiet ascension” that might atually be a statistical “quiet descent’ in non-local traffic. No mention of the acquisition of BuzzTracker and Alan Warms — didn’t they announce HE’s the guy running Yahoo News? Flat-out mistake in Moore’s quote that the MSNBC.com newsroom employs 150-200 people (check the MSNBC.com release on Newsvine today — 200 is the entire global workforce of the whole MSNBC.com enterprise - not the newsroom team). Flat out assertion - unverified — that Yahoo News is more profitable than its competitors. And if you’re going to compare Yahoo’s traffic with broadcast TV news — why would you pick last-place CBS’s 6-million to carry the TV standard — unless you needed a number that made Yahoo look good?

  Wow. This is top-flight analysis !! I’m gonna go buy me some stock.

• 9. MSM  |  October 8th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

  CORRECTION — IB’s rollup is with CNN of course. My bad. But the rest of the criticisms stand

• 10. kay  |  October 8th, 2007 at 2:04 pm

  Here is the ridiculous catch-22 of the aggregators (and I would include CNN.com in there because historically they have done very little real newsgathering or writing for the Web. The stories they produce for TV look slim at best and ridiculous at worst when converted to a print and compared with the AP stories on the same topic.) The aggregators wouldn’t have anything to aggregate without the locals and yet the locals are worried about aggregators stealing their audience.

  Every “national” story is local somewhere and the locals know their markets best. The best reporting for major news events outside of NY, Washington and Atlanta, inevitable comes from the local paper or station who have spent years on that beat.

  Now that a national audience is able to reach those sources directly on the Internet, the combination of the “locals” becomes a big threat to the “nationals.” I’m sure that was the motivation for the CNN/ IB deal.

  The locals just need to push the business model back more. If your local advertisers only want local eyes. Perhaps you could swap inventory with geo-targeting. If the aggregators want the national eyes on your local stories, why shouldn’t you get a portion of the local eyes they have on their other national stories.

  Joining geo-targeting ad networks where national advertisers might be spending in search of local eyes in specific markets, could also open up your revenue streams.

  (You could also join with other locals to develop a news-driven platform to maximize your development budgets. Or even reject the traditional newspaper layout or a CNN.com style site altogether. Explore what you can do with open source technology platforms. Just don’t complete discount your power in this situation.)

  Yahoo! has been committed to providing a great User Experience in all of their products. They deserve to be the number one news and information site. CNN.com did the exact same with Yahoo! that CNN did with Fox News — dismiss them as a competitor prematurely. MSNBC needs a redesign and a new approach to “services”, perhaps Newsvine will provide that for them.

  Most importantly, Yahoo! seem to be committed to using the Web as the Web and not turning it into a vehicle for recycled TV packages. If they pushed a little further with this product, they could pull away from CNN and MSNBC completely.

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