AOL, Yahoo find value in original online news; eyeing laid-off journalists
As News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch tries to figure out how to charge for newspaper content and the Associated Press continues to whine about online news aggregators offering up its content, AOL and Yahoo seem to be beefing up their own news operations to provide original content.
In an interview for the NY Times Bits blog, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz spoke of the need to increase the number of pages people are consuming with the Yahoo site and the number of display ads on those pages. “My fortunes are tied to my pages,” she said. The NY Times post continues:
When it comes to those pages, Yahoo seems to be in a state of confusion. Its Sports section, for example, has reporters producing top-notch original material ranging from scoopy news items and blogs to long-form analysis pieces. The other parts of Yahoo tend to rely far more heavily on stories and other content from outside organizations. According to Ms. Bartz, the majority of Yahoo’s sites will go the way of Sports. In particular, Yahoo will throw investments behind its entertainment, finance and news operations. Ms. Bartz noted that there are plenty of unemployed journalists out there to pick up.
AOL, on the other hand, tells ZDNet's sister site BNET that it wants to be "the largest publisher of high-quality content in the world." The BNET report notes that AOL has hired some 1,500 journalists in the last 18 months or so - a number it expects to double or even triple over the coming year. Some are full-time employees, while most are freelancers. Marty Moe, senior vice president of AOL Media, tells BNET:
Principally, we have none of the legacy costs associated with producing print publications, for example. We don’t own printing presses, or fleets of delivery trucks. We don’t have the elaborate editorial structures geared to producing products over a printing press... Over time, talent is a fixed cost. You can syndicate it, distribute it as you scale. Furthermore, we are already the largest branded content company in the U.S., with an audience of 75 million domestic uniques. At our size, we can leverage the cost of our publishing and content management systems along with the talent and make the whole thing do-able on an advertising model.
What's frustrating is that newspapers - which carried all of those legacy costs that Moe spoke of - weren't able to easily shed those fixed costs and focus on the investment in news gathering for an online platform.
Where most newspapers blew it was by trying to make the online edition an extension of the print model - a model where content for the print edition was posted to the online edition as more of an after-thought and never allowed to scoop the mighty print edition.
Instead, the newspapers should have taken the opposite approach - put as much content on the Web as possible and then, based on online traffic and even the number of reader comments, re-hash the best of the online content into a nightly print product: a print version of the day's online news, if you will.
It's easy for me to do some Monday morning quarterbacking about what the newspaper industry should and shouldn't have done - but that won't put many of my friends and former colleagues back to work. Instead, it's reassuring to see that companies like AOL and Yahoo recognize the value in original content and are willing to pay to put it on their Web pages.
Let me know if you need some names of talented out-of-work journalists. Sadly, I have a way-too-long list of former colleagues who've been handed pink slips over the last year or so.