Backstage at our homepage

Posted November 25th, 2008 at 2:28 pm by Nicki Dugan, Blog Editor

 18 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes, Greatest Hits, Video, Working at Yahoo!

One hundred million people. It’s the population of America’s 60 largest cities combined (from NYC to Toledo). It’s about three million more than the size of this year’s record-breaking Super Bowl audience. And it’s the number of people who visit the Yahoo! Homepage every month.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to program news content for that kind of a massive audience. (Let’s just say Yodel Anecdotal’s readership has a ways to go.) After all, you’re basically responsible for informing roughly one in every two American Internet users about what’s happening in our world…and influencing what they talk about over cube walls. What does that responsibility feel like? How do they stay on top of the fire hose of news and then decide what gets one of those precious links? Who is “they” and what prepares them for this big job? How do they know what will click? What was it like to cover this year’s Election?

I took a camera backstage to answer these questions and more. Enjoy this up-close-and-personal look inside the Yahoo! Homepage newsroom.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Filmed and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau

Tagged: Behind the Scenes, Video, Working at Yahoo!, yahoo! homepage

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18 Comments Add your own

Brinke | November 25th, 2008 at 7:57 pm

Well done.

GuillaumeB | November 26th, 2008 at 10:32 am

That was very interesting and of course, now I’m wondering is he new homepage will actually change parts of your job. Apart from my personal blog, i myself work for a news site with a fairly large community over here in France and it’s true it is always very stressful the moment you’ve clicked on the publish button

Miguel Garcia | November 26th, 2008 at 2:00 pm

So, now i see the difference!
I work for a year at Yahoo! Mexico, funny, you guys have a big team for the Front Page, I used to work for frontpage, sports, finance, and search!
It is nice to see how inside the same company, there are so much differences!
REgards

robert08 | November 26th, 2008 at 10:48 pm

The work done by you good and useful.

gag | November 29th, 2008 at 3:34 am

I finally found time to watch this video and it was amazing

i have previously worked as a surfer but oh my god! even though i am a gemini i find this work scary but i guess its interesting. y’all are amazing

As i have already told, news or information soon would be presented in short (briefs)

If its presented in brief then people would like a date line slider where they drag slider from left to right and quickly read the days events. Even a oscilloscope could be added to show how much the news has spiked

in some countries people are using mobile to access everything but it would help if its given as last 5 minutes/1hour/6hours instead of topics

their could also be a icon for kids and in this section any news item selected makes a social networking like connections and show all knowledge connected to that topic
ex: news about giant squid open a page where their are links to fishes, other squids, ocean sounds from yahoo directory etc

gag | November 29th, 2008 at 3:41 am

i am sorry if i blabber, i just type out my suggestions but i also think coz we are going global it time to include a map icon which would become bigger when selected and then when show weather, date n time/time zone and also dots indicating breaking or important news and then map to news browsing if possible, else important cities across the globe

Leigh Turpin | November 29th, 2008 at 10:10 pm

I really like the new website design. Can I keep it now?

Leigh Turpin

gag | November 30th, 2008 at 1:45 am

coz their is so much news for the front page why not add a shuffle icon for the last news title clicking which would randomly change the news to something else from the stack of news stories, yep it would be complicating things but it makes sense coz you do mention that there is lot to report

Sarah B. | December 4th, 2008 at 11:51 am

Great video!! What happens with the editorial on the weekends?

Nicki Dugan | December 5th, 2008 at 2:03 pm

@Sarah B. – Great question. The team is staffed to monitor news events around the clock, 7 days a week. There are certain weekend topics that they plan out in advance but there’s a team dedicated to covering news over the weekend so you don’t miss a thing.

gag | December 6th, 2008 at 5:56 am

people nowadays use sms language and short text language in their blogs for communicating

Buzz is a great place to experiment a whole new informal English language trend for news, blogs and basically knowledge

yahoo! can start the trend and set standards where news, blogs and information is shown in short sms language format

it can also become a distribution platform for such language of the future

James B | December 6th, 2008 at 9:47 am

Now you need an anchor for a nightly newscast, call it Yahoo Nightly News…

intl | December 20th, 2008 at 12:18 pm

it’s great!

but, your reference to “population of America’s 60 largest cities combined (from NYC to Toledo)” is misleading.

it is, in the sense that these 100 million are coming from all around the world (unless you are counting only US based users — if you are, you should clarify), and therefore the reference to only US cities sounds strange.

I understand you just want to provide a way of comparing, or of being amazed by how many people visit the Yahoo! (US) front page, and I also understand that *any* reference to international would result, at the very least, confusing and irrelevant for most of the American readers (unfortunately, but it’s the reality).

in any case, congratulations for having such an amazing product, and great audience, no matter where it comes from!:-)

dignity in life | December 23rd, 2008 at 9:28 pm

This really opens up my eyes!

Wpromote | February 23rd, 2009 at 10:27 am

Great video blog, keep up the great work guys!

adwords management | June 1st, 2009 at 12:57 pm

Cool Video! By the way, it’s amazing how many people visit yahoo each month. Thanks for taking us behind the scenes. that was a really great post.

jessica | June 26th, 2009 at 8:30 am

nice work, keep it up!!

James | September 28th, 2009 at 3:05 pm

I don’t know who to contact or how, but I stumbled upon this comment box so I hope this moves up the chain somehow. I have been an avid Yahoo! user for nearly 10 years now, and usually when the home page changes their design I welcome it and take time to get used to it. However, this new one has me more reluctant to even go on the site! It is absolutely ridiculous. I get so annoyed when i move my mouse over the left bar accidentally and pops out the information for something I never intended to roll over. Or, what happened just now that made me look for a contact table, scrolling over a featured article to click on it only to have slightly breezed the one next to it and click on that one instead. I am really fed up with this new Yahoo! page. I always click “Go to class Yahoo!” but it never stays as my page. Why the change? Why THIS change? Lose it, please.