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.

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

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!

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.

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.

says alot.