Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.
Yahoo News is an aggregator of news from major media outlets, though it produces some original content of its own.
Yahoo News is the web’s most popular news site, with more than 88 million unique visitors in the month of April 2011. Yahoo, the search engine, web portal, and parent of Yahoo News, is the fourth-most-visited site on the web overall. As of 2012, it was the most-trafficked news site in 10 content categories, including news, finance, sports, and entertainment.
Yahoo News uses a combination of computer algorithms and human editing to determine its news aggregation. The site has longtime content-providing partnerships with the Associated Press and other news wires.
Yahoo also has made agreements with other news organizations, including an extensive content-sharing partnership with ABC News formed in 2011, along with aforeign-news partnership with the McClatchy newspaper chain and the NGO newsgatherer OneWorld.net. In 2013, it added video partnerships with Conde Nast and WWE and announced it would produce several web shows. As of 2012, the videos co-produced by ABC and Yahoo reportedly accounted for nearly half of the general news videos watched online. It has also bought other news-related companies, such as the news aggregator BuzzTracker in 2007 and the online content producer Associated Content(since integrated into Yahoo Voices), social sports site Citizen Sports in 2010, and contextual mobile app Aviate in 2014.
Yahoo produces some of its own news content. In 2006 it launched the citizen journalism site You Witness News. It also hired numerous columns and bloggers for specialty sites like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports, which is the most popular sports site on the web. In 2013, it hired former CBS News anchor Katie Couric as its global anchor andlongtime New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to headline its expanded tech coverage. It also hired NBC’s Michael Isikoff as an investigative reporter.
Yahoo also runs a video newsmagazine program initially called The Insider, but renamed omg! Insider in 2013. The show is distributed through CBS.
In 2009 and 2010, Yahoo began making a similar push into original content in Yahoo News, hiring several prominent journalists, opening a Washington bureau, and launching The Upshot network of blogs, covering politics, national affairs, media, and foreign policy. Yahoo said its blogs generated more than 550 million pageviews in February 2011. In 2013, Yahoo was reported to be moving away from original content in favor of user-generated material.
In 2013, Yahoobought the news-summarizing app Summly, with plans to fold it and incorporate its algorithm into its mobile technology. Summly ended up becoming the foundation for Yahoo News Digest, a twice-daily news app introduced in 2014.
In 2006, Yahoo began a local advertising partnership with seven newspaper companies then known as The Newspaper Consortium. The Consortium began with an agreement with MediaNews and Belo newspapers and now comprises 30 newspaper companies representing nearly 800 newspapers. The agreement allowed Yahoo to sell national advertising across the papers’ websites and allowed the papers to use Yahoo search and share its ad revenue. Yahoo also had an advertising agreement with all of Gannett, covering all of its publishing and broadcast properties.
The Consortium went into hiatus after 2011, then was relaunched in 2013 as the Local Media Consortium, but no longer with an exclusive partnership with Yahoo. In 2014, the Consortium signed a partnership with Google.
Part of the Consortium arrangement had involved newspapers’ ability to use Yahoo’s HotJobs to power local classified ads. Yahoo sold HotJobs to the job-search site Monster in February 2010, but it reassured newspapers that they would be able to continue working with HotJobs after the sale.
Yahoo began integrating Facebook’s features onto its website in September 2011, with more than 10 million Facebook users activating the integrated features within two months. In November 2011, it launched Livestand, a personalized news app for the iPad. The app was commonly compared to Flipboard at its launch. Livestand was shut down in May 2012.
Yahoo redesigned its homepage in 2013 to emphasize personalization and sharing, adding a personalized scrolling news feed that included Twitter updates. It also purchased the social blogging site Tumblr later that year.
