News to view from Yahoo
YAHOO INC. PULLED BACK the curtain Monday on the first production of its media-empire-in-the-making in Santa Monica. It was (drumroll please) ... a news program (rim shot).
If that sounds familiar, that’s because, well, it is. Online news sites proliferated during the dot-com craze of the 1990s, although many that emphasized video sank when the Internet bubble burst. Video news sites have made a resurgence in recent years, both from commercial sources such as TV networks and from amateurs doing video blogs.
Yahoo’s effort, called “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone,” is a hybrid -- a professional journalist doing something that looks suspiciously like a blog. Sites plans to offer daily video, audio and text dispatches from war zones around the globe, and he promises to participate in online chat sessions and videoconferences. His program is most likely to appeal to people who don’t care much for TV news programs (read: young people); in that sense, it’s not competing with “World News Tonight” so much as with Google News and the blogosphere.
Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel, who used to run the Warner Bros. movie studio, and Lloyd Braun, the former ABC television executive who leads Yahoo’s media and entertainment efforts, have been coy about what the Yahoo Media Group will do in its massive new office complex. One of the few things Braun has made clear is that Yahoo is not interested in merely producing and transmitting news or entertainment like a network or a broadcaster. The implication is that the Yahoo Media Group wants to complement the media establishment rather than destroy it. Its products would add to the array of choices presented to Web surfers who point their browsers at Yahoo’s site. Someone looking for Iraq news, for example, might find Sites’ reports alongside those from the wire services, the BBC, CNN CBS and this newspaper, which provides news to Yahoo.
Yet the so-called mainstream media (aka the MSM) can’t take too much comfort from Yahoo’s strategy. The MSM has established more than just a beachhead on the Web, of course, but few sites can match Yahoo’s ability to make a wide array of material available on demand, filter it to suit a person’s tastes, then allow for further refinement through user feedback. If programs such as Sites’ are compelling, they will hasten the public’s shift toward the interactivity of the Web and away from more passive traditional sources of information and entertainment, such as TV, magazines and (here we are again) this newspaper.
