Via Editors Weblog: Yahoo News has topped every online news site by producing the most visitor traffic during the past six months. It sources approximately 100 news organizations and 7,000 online news sites. It also allows the user to jump through headlines without having to wait for source pages to reload, and accompanies headlines with content from blogs and other sites. Yahoo News uses a “hybrid” editing strategy, in which computers scan sources while human editors decide what is page-worthy.
Newspaper companies investing in Topix
April 18, 2005 by
Via Sign On San Diego: The rising number of readership and advertising spending online has drawn three major newspaper companies to invest in Topix.net, a startup technology company that collects and sorts news stories from various sources on the Internet. Gannett Co., Knight Ridder Inc. and Tribune Co. will each take a 25 percent stake in the California based company, while the founders will retain the remaining share. Although Topix has launched its site more than a year ago, it has only reached around 1.4 million users monthly, which is still well behind the 5.9 million users of Google News, according to comScore Media Metrix. Topix, a small company consisting of nine employees, is profitable. It earns around $1 million in annual revenues, mostly from advertising, according to CEO and co-founder Rich Skrenta.
Stop fearing the Web, says Murdoch to newspaper editors
April 13, 2005 by
Via Editor & Publisher: The digital revolution is becoming more important as young news consumers turn away from newspapers and embrace the Web, according to media mogul Rupert Murdoch at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference Wednesday. These young news consumers, dubbed “digital natives” by Murdoch, “have a different set of expectations of the kind of news they will get … including when and how they will get it, and who they will get it from.” Of the digital natives between the ages of 18 and 34, 44 percent use the Internet once a day for news, but only 19 percent use printed newspapers, Murdoch said. “In the face of this revolution, we have been slow to react. We have sat by and watched while our newspapers have lost circulation,” said Murdoch.
