Calling all media junkies

Posted November 20th, 2006 at 5:30 am by Sue Decker, President

 3 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

I have a confession to make: I’ve been a media junkie my whole life. Even though I spend the vast majority of my media time online these days (and oh, yes, my work time, too), I have always been a newspaper fanatic. I delivered the Rocky Mountain News as a kid and, even today, I rarely board a plane with less than three papers folded under my arm. There’s something about the portability and the discoverability of news in that format that’s always appealed to me and I continue to be fascinated by the amount of insight, aggregation, production and distribution that happens in a 24-hour period at newspaper operations around the country. While so many new media have emerged over the years — first radio, then television, and ultimately cable and the Internet — newspapers remain one of the best ways to find relevant information (news, sports, classified ads, events) about what’s happening in your own backyard.

Yahoo! is a growing force in local content, too. We’re seeing huge growth in all things local, including user reviews and ratings in Yahoo! Local, our online yellow page offerings, job listings in Yahoo! HotJobs, our great new Yahoo! Maps, access to local news and sports content right from our home page, and even through RSS feeds on My Yahoo!.

But we have a great opportunity to do more, now in concert with our new partners, a consortium of more than 150 U.S. newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Houston Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. Newspapers have always represented and connected local communities and their ability to bring physical communities online is a great complement to the virtual communities Yahoo! brings together.

What’s in it for you? We’ll have the opportunity to provide you with deeper, more relevant local content across our network from myriad sources, now including your local newspaper. If you’re a recruiter, you’ll have a one-stop shop that allows you to simultaneously place a job listing on your newspaper’s web site and on Yahoo! HotJobs. You’ll also enjoy state-of-the-­art recruiting tools and access to a larger pool of job seekers that you can more precisely target by location, industry, occupation or behavior. Similarly as a job seeker, you’ll have a larger pool of national and local jobs accessible in a searchable, easy-to-use format that will make it easier for you to find and apply for a job.

And if you advertise on Yahoo! or with any of our newspaper partners, we’ve created great new opportunities for you to reach the consumers you want through local, search or graphical advertising delivered in a more relevant, targeted way.

What’s in it for our newspaper partners? This partnership gives them the opportunity to get their content and help-wanted ads in front of millions more consumers than they can reach in their local markets, along with better search and other tools to improve the experience for online readers.

And for Yahoo!, we have the opportunity to do one of our favorite things — to better personalize your online experience and connect you to your passions and communities. I hope you enjoy the new features, as I will. But you’ll still find me carrying my newspapers with me wherever I go.

Sue Decker
Executive Vice President and CFO

Photo from thorii pablo

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3 Comments Add your own

paul | November 20th, 2006 at 1:24 pm

Partnering with the dead tree press doesn’t inspire me, why not aggregate a few hundred blogs into Yahoo news?

Cory O'Connor | December 8th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

Dear Sue,

You are brilliant and everyone is saying so.

I am happy for all that is going on in your life. You deserve every bit of good praise coming your way. Yahoo’s employees and shareholders have a right to be confident about the direction of their company. Customers, too. With you and Terry nothing is impossible.

It is exciting to say “I knew you when” and to see how you’ve grown into a superstar…with much more to come.

How fun!

Love,
Cory

sms | February 8th, 2007 at 7:55 pm

if even .01% of bloggers out there had anything relevant or interesting to say other than recycling info from media sources, i’m sure it’d make for a swell content source. this is a smart deal on yahoo’s part. not sure if the newspapers are getting equal weight out of it, but certainly a win for yahoo.