Yahoo's original news content to be syndicated for print

Posted by John Burke on November 18, 2005 at 10:16 AM

Web portal Yahoo's first venture into original content, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, will be syndicated for print media by Scripps Howard News Service Wire. A deal such as this and the popularity of the war reporting site shows that Internet-based companies, whose main function is not journalism, can produce attractive content.

Although specific traffic figures to the site are not given, Yahoo is the most popular website in the world which certainly helps the "solo journalist" publication. Perhaps the most telling figure of the sites success with audiences is the number of comments posted on the site. Looking at today's page (Sites is in Iraq), some postings have received close to 1,000 comments.

This also characterizes the future of news in that readers will increasingly expect interactive features, to be able to participate in the news process.

Hotzone is not the first website to be syndicated. The Huffington Post struck a deal with the Tribune Company in June to have its own online material printed.

As newspapers cut staff and overseas bureaus and more independent specialized news websites emerge around the world, will the prediction that newspapers will become news aggregators become reality? What are the consequences for newspapers in printing content intended for the Internet?

Source: LostRemote