Yahoo News & Jerry

From Marketwatch:

Why old media dreads Yahoo News

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- If the mainstream media wanted a scapegoat to blame for Yahoo News' enormous popularity, they could single out Jerry Garcia.

You see, when the beloved Grateful Dead leader died, early in the morning on Aug. 9, 1995, Yahoo's brain trust flew into action. According to Yahoo folklore, co-founder Jerry Yang and other top executives promptly got together and forever changed the philosophy of what had been a directory site.

"Jerry said, 'We've got to do something,'" Neil Budde, who has been Yahoo News' general manager since 2004, told me with a smile. Yahoo promptly constructed a page linking to the coverage of Garcia's death.

"That was the genesis of the full coverage of Yahoo News," Budde said.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based Yahoo News, a unit of Yahoo Inc. has kept on truckin' ever since. For the past few months, Budde said, it has been the leader in page views, no doubt adding to the dread of old-media rivals.

In January, Yahoo said it drew 27.6 million users, citing figures from Comscore Media Metrix.
The key has been Yahoo's ability to capitalize on the revolutionary ways that people now "consume news" (to borrow one of Budde's favorite geek-speak phrases).

Once, things were so simple in the ways that Americans obtained their news. We read the morning paper over breakfast and then watched Walter Cronkite during dinner. Today, of course, people get their news in bits and pieces (if not bits and bytes) throughout the workday, as they check their email and do searches.

"There is not just one preferred source at one time during the day," Budde, 49, said happily.
So what if Yahoo News offers little original content? And what does it matter that its customers may sometimes seem like, well, a bunch of yahoos when they clamor to read a "news" bulletins about the occasional freak of nature -- such as the one about a one-eyed cat? For sure, Yahoo has about as much of a chance of winning a Pulitzer as "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central.
Critics

Yahoo's critics gripe, with seemingly considerable justification, that it doesn't belong in their league because it provides precious little original content and is content to live off the reputations of its content-supplying partners. (This argument reminds me of what Time and Newsweek editors say when they dismiss The Week, a much smaller rival which is catching on).
When Yahoo executives hear that kind of talk, they might just as well roll their eyes, retorting: Yeah? And what's your point?

In other words, Budde won't lose any sleep about the carping. Neilsen/NetRatings pointed out on Thursday that Yahoo's sponsored links rose 21% over the past six months.
Perhaps as a sop to Yahoo's critics, Budde says his company will add more homegrown content (but rest assured, not too much). For now, Yahoo News' claim to fame is the reporting of its own Kevin Sites in what Yahoo calls the Hot Zone.

Budde said Yahoo can bolster its news coverage by adding video partnerships and expanding international coverage.

"We're not looking to go out and create a huge news-gathering organization of our own," he said, "What we see is our users preferring a variety of sources," not a single brand.

Yahoo's success underscores the distinctions between Web journalism and the traditional media, which are as different as, say, hip-hop and rock and roll. To flourish, online journalists need to be almost as entertaining as informative and must always operate in a real-time world. "We continuously update the news," Budde said.

Yahoo moves aggressively to exploit opportunities, adapts quickly to change and, crucially, gives the people what they want. Innovation is essential and complacency is a dirty word.

In the past year, Yahoo News has redesigned its site, struck video deals with CNN and ABC News and added such well-liked blogs as Huffington Post and Gawker. Yahoo even forged an agreement with NASA to provide coverage of the Space Shuttle Discovery launch.

Budde is taking aim at flexing Yahoo's muscle in the amount of time people spend reading stuff on the site. "It's more important (than page views) and growing in importance," he said, particularly "from an advertising standpoint. It shows we're engaging our customers."

Pioneer

Budde, a veteran of the Louisville Courier-Journal and USA Today, is one of the pioneers of online journalism. In 1995, he was the founding editor and publisher of the Wall Street Journal Online, the largest paid news site on the Internet. (Like the WSJ, MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones).

To say the least, Yahoo publishes "news" that wouldn't crack the Journal's vaunted front page.
Budde laughed out loud as he told me that a story about a one-eyed cat was "the most emailed story for a week."

Turning serious, he said: "I think it says consumers are interested in a wide range of topics. What people choose to email and pass along is different than what they might read."
And what does Budde worry about?

"I worry about the future of journalism," he said. While he believes that "the great journalism is still being done by the traditional news companies," he conceded that it's challenging for them "in a world where everything gets fragmented."

I was surprised that he wasn't obsessed about Google, which looms as one of Yahoo's biggest threats.

"We keep an eye on all of the people who provide news. I'm more obsessed about what users want than what others are doing."

No friend of the devil

When CNN reported the highlights of Vice President Dick Cheney's interview with Fox News anchor Brit Hume, it vaguely attributed the scoop to another "cable network" without identifying Fox by name.

Boo!

Of course, every media organization lusted after this "get." Adding to the anticipation, Cheney had kept mum for days after accidentally shooting a 78-year-old friend during a hunting trip on Feb. 11 in Texas.

It's curious. Effectively, CNN, which questioned Cheney's decision not to practice full disclosure, didn't fully disclose the identity of the network that snared that scoop.