How successful is Yahoo's original news initiative?
AdAge reports that Yahoo's foray into original content news production has had a 'slow start'; traffic is low.
The Yahoo initiative began when Lloyd Braun, former head of ABC Television, was hired to bring his creative expertise to the Yahoo operation.
Braun launched the original content initiative on Yahoo News, which has a number of different features, including dispatches form a foreign correspondent/blogger, an adventure travel feature, content from blog groups Gawker and HuffingtonPost.com, as well as original content from well known financial columnists on Yahoo Finance.
Yahoo's foreign correspondant Kevin Sites of Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (launched September 2005) is the poster child for Yahoo's 'next generation' services, but his reports, viewed by only 1 million users, are not getting enough traffic. Sites reports on the conditions in countries afflicted by war and poverty; advertisers often feel it is risky to associate their brands with such content. Media analyst Barry Parr says: You really can't do news without upsetting advertisers."
The adventure travel reports, put together by Richard Bang and called Richard Bang's Adventures (launched October 2005) have had traffic numbers too low for Nielsen/Ratings to count.
Let's not forget that despite these teething problems with the new content, Yahoo News still has 25 million viewers per month.
Furthermore, "analysts agreed the content is innovative." As Sarah Kim of VP-media states: "It delivers what the Web is supposed to -- an in-the-minute, unedited type of feel."
Given that Yahoo's new 'hot zone' dispatches and travel 'adventures' were only launched very recently, it may be that they just need some more time to catch on.
Source: AdAge (registration required)
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As someone covering the region, worrying as it is, all the more because two journalists were shot and killed, I am not inclined to accept the veracity of Sipah-i-Islami or the claim that it has made. I remember, receiving faxes every now and then when the U.s was about to launch its campaign in Afghanistan by this or that outfit, not heard of before. I think, we as journalists need to apply our minds before jumping to any conclusion and misleading our readers to come to wrong conclusion. No such organisation by the name of Sipah-i-Islami exists. Period. I think, and there are reasons to believe, that it was an attempt to hush up tribal journalists from reporting on the presence of foreign militants in South Waziristan and I think, going by an incident in North Waziritan and its reporting by tribal journalists who did not want to be named or datelined the story to N. Waziristan, those behind the murder achieved their objective.
bests
ismail khan