The battle for control of Yahoo is being analyzed from all angles but one. What will it mean to the media business if Microsoft gobbles up Yahoo, as many analysts believe it will?
In their war of wars over search-driven online advertising, Google and Microsoft-Yahoo could end up eliminating one of the largest content-creation teams yet assembled on the Web.
Alone among the Internet giants, Yahoo has devoted substantial resources to creating news and feature content. It’s hired writers, reporters, and editors, whereas Google News, for example, has always proudly boasted that no humans are involved (creatively) in its product.
The difference is most notable on Yahoo’s traditional, non-personalized, portal page. Many of us working in the online news industry prefer this as our home page, for several business-related reasons.
The news headlines displayed there are as up-to-date as you’ll find on the Web. All the major news services appear, and the Yahoo News staff cycles new stories in and out all day long. Behind this selection is one of the best examples of an active news judgment is work behind the scenes.
The algorithms driving Google News are beautiful things, and they perform almost flawlessly in reflecting the Wisdom of the Crowd. But, when it comes to decisions about which news stories matter most, the algorithm simply does not exist that can replace professional journalists exercising their best news judgment.
So, if Microsoft prevails in its takeover attempt, what will happen to Yahoo News?
In the mid-nineties, around the same time a tiny group of independent journalists launched Salon in San Francisco, Microsoft financed the creation of a similar web magazine, Slate, from its headquarters in suburban Seattle.
Slate never fit into Microsoft’s culture and was eventually spun off to the Washington Post, under whose auspices it operates today from the nation’s capital. Salon has survived a series of financial crises, and remains an independent media company to this day.
(Note: I worked at Salon during its launch in 1995, and again from 1998-2000, including a stint as Washington, D.C., bureau chief during the run-up to the 2000 elections.)
Of course, Microsoft also joined with NBC to launch one of the early, big cable TV/website combos in MSNBC, and the software giant seems to have largely left the decision-making about news in the hands of media professionals there.
Yahoo News boasts an extensive group of columnists who publish on everything from beauty to financial advice, and relationships to sports. It’s difficult to imagine that this sprawling creative operation – the diametric opposite of an algorithm – will fit easily into Microsoft’s, or Google’s, future plans.
If it doesn’t, the entire online new and creative community would suffer as a result.
