Time for a change: The Associated Press as Napsterized news

April 28, 2005 by

The Associated Press is planting the seeds of its own demise.

AP’s most recent act of self-destruction was its April 18 announcement that it would start charging newspaper and broadcast clients an additional fee for using AP content on their web sites.

This move — sprung on its clients just as they are recognizing the urgent need to reinvent themselves in multi-media, web-driven modes — ignores powerful trends:

  • All forms of content are migrating – each to its most appropriate medium. Readers and advertisers are following.
  • As news media and other information providers jump into one media platform after another, the Web is emerging as their operational core.
  • From blogs to open-source journalism to free newspapers, a wave of unpaid information is sweeping paid information off the media beach.
  • As content loses value, expert editing and customer-driven bundling are becoming the tools for building audience. And audience — not content — is the news industry’s value proposition.

Contrast those trends with AP’s recent moves:

  • Belatedly taking note of precipitous readership declines among young people, the AP is shopping around a youth publication prototype called APtitude. Its dominant story form is long narrative accompanied by a photo or two. But young people, as Rupert Murdoch recently pointed out, are digital natives, not digital immigrants. Their primary language is digital. When they do use their secondary language, print, their warmest response is to print formats that are highly visual and that are built with high proportions of short, non-narrative story forms. (See recent research at the Readership Institute.) This ill-conceived venture will add to the costs born by AP clients.
  • Addicted to its transmission fee revenues, AP has chosen not to replace its high-cost distribution model (whose roots were planted in the telegraph era) with low-cost web distribution.
  • Confronted with the rapidly growing need for web-specific content like Flash files, audio clips and other multimedia elements, AP has chosen to spend more of its members’ money to create that content rather than facilitate content-sharing among its members.

AP started as a cooperative. Today, it is a cooperative in name only. It’s time to take a lesson from music swappers and invent the new AP – a digital cooperative, a Napsterized news service.

The 21st Century news business needs a peer-to-peer network that lets local operations drive cost out of their non-local news packages, divert resources to local web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and internet pure plays.

The network should be a closed, password-protected system. All content would live on members’ computers and would be indexed and shared through a central search. Open source software would keep costs down and assure compatibility with both Mac and Windows PCs.

Sharing would be governed by a karmic balance. The more you make available to the network, the more you can take out. An organization in karmic deficit would have to true up by paying a surcharge on the monthly fee.

An elected committee would administer the network, set sharing rules and levy the monthly fees – which primarily would pay for technology.

The network should support subgroups, allowing operations under common ownership to share files within the larger system and make those files available outside each subgroup as they see fit. This sub-group ability also would encourage regional networks — or even groups with a special interest in a particular story or subject area — to form ad hoc.

Members would have to adopt thorough formatting taxonomy and keywording schemes that would make articles easy to search, sort and parse for publication. Suitable schemes already exist through independent standards bodies such as the International Press Telecommunications Council and the news division of the Special Libraries Association.

A PubSub-like function would allow a member to be notified when stories with key topics hit the networks. For instance, a Knoxville newspaper or broadcast outlet would get an alert when any member uploaded a story about the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

Of course, editing standards would be as varied as the members – and in some cases would not be up to the AP’s standards. But most news operations – particularly those in small or mid-sized markets – use less wire copy these days and try to localize what they do use. So long as members attribute with care, journalistic standards will not be in jeopardy.

If the network pulled in one or two large U.S. news organizations plus a few from abroad, national and world news demands could be met easily. Members with adequate editing capacity could work network content into tight national and world packages and make those available – perhaps for added Karma credit within the network.

The AP creates very little exclusive coverage. With enough members and shared editing capacity, the nation/world category would be dealt with easily.

Perhaps the toughest content area to cover would be statistical services like sports agate and stock tables. But think about that for a minute. Are stock tables still relevant when every investor has her portfolio set up on a financial web site? And couldn’t a committee of sports editors come up with an alternative source of box scores?

Although the technological challenges of Napsterized news might seem formidable to many news people, they are, in fact, minor. Most of the technology already exists, much of it is in open source and dealing with it isn’t rocket science.

Most news organizations already use the Internet extensively, have plenty of file servers and understand Windows/Apple networks. There would be no massive, centralized technology. The concept is lean, with most of the computing power residing at each member’s location.

As we started talking about this, we asked ourselves, “Yeah, but when have newspapers ever succeeded in working together? Look at New Century Network and all the other cooperative brainstorms that failed.”

But all such initiatives started with fatal flaws:

  • Some took control away from participants. Our idea leaves control with the members.
  • Ego wrecked many of them. But egos tend to calm down when no power position exists. Sharing is just sharing.
  • Voracious money pits swallowed most of them. This idea, to the contrary, could save news organizations a lot of money. Imagine driving 90% of the cost out of a newspapers’ wire service budget line. How much excellent local coverage could be created with the money saved?

If AP had its collective head firmly inside the 21st Century, it already would be moving at least parts of its services in the Napster direction. But AP is like any business confronted with a disruptive technology. Its first inclination is self-preservation, not cannibalization.

One of the smaller news services with less to lose could jump into Napsterized news, but the small ones tend to follow the lead of the big ones.

The best bet is a start-up consortium, perhaps starting with a few of the smaller corporate groups and independent newspapers.

We’re ready to host the first meeting. Anybody want to talk?

Bob Benz is general manager of print web operations for E.W. Scripps. Mike Phillips is the company’s newspaper division editorial director.

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Human and automated aggregators help make sense of blogosphere

April 5, 2005 by

“There are actually 7 million blogs being watched on this one site called Technorati. And it gives you an idea of what is going on. And there’s so much out there. And it’s so hard to keep track of it all. But if you take a look at a site like this it will break it down for you.” — Jacki Schechner, CNN’s blog reporter, talking on “Inside Politics”

Nothing could be weirder than the first time you watch CNN’s “Inside the Blogs,” a segment on Judy Woodruff’s “Inside Politics.” CNN’s “blog reporter” Jacki Schechner does a tag team with producer Abbi Tatton, as they bring up Weblogs on dueling computer monitors and tell you what the blogs are saying about the issue du jour.

But this is the logical next step in the evolution of blogs — whether the old-school bloggers like it or not — as mainstream culture grapples with the concept of Weblogs and their growing power in punditry. Increasingly, mainstream media outlets will need to explain how memes spread in the blogosphere, who is saying what, and what their agenda is, if any.

While bloggers might resist attempts to superficially or technologically assess “what the blogosphere thinks” on a particular issue, these aggregated looks by CNN and now Slate’s “Today’s Blogs” (also launched in February) are windows into a world that is new to so many people. Plus, very few bloggers would turn down the promotion they receive from mainstream media exposure.

And for journalists, aggregators can be a blessing, giving them a quick read on an issue, offering new insight on a topic of research, or putting them in touch with new sources for a story. After journalists’ stories have been posted online, they can track feedback by searching via engines such as Technorati or Daypop.

So here’s a guide to some of the better blog aggregation efforts so far. I’ve kept away from pure RSS readers such as NewsGator or Bloglines, as they offer more of a software solution than an editorial or weighted view into blogs. Keep in mind that most of these features and services are new and sometimes buggy or inaccurate. But having a flawed reading is better than the alternative: reading all 7 million blogs yourself.

The list is in order of those with the most human touch to those that employ the most automation. In all cases, I tried to focus on how blogs viewed the recent death of Pope John Paul II.

CNN’s Inside the Blogs

So how do you do good TV about blogs? Many cable news shows have started booking bloggers such as Robert Cox and Jeff Jarvis regularly. But CNN decided to take a different tack with its blog reporter and politics producer going on-screen in a special section of the set. The pair shows actual blog pages and postings with the CNN talking heads poking out of a small box in the corner of the screen. On the pope’s death, they noted that some bloggers were actually happy about it (though they didn’t name names), and pointed to The Pope Blog and the Catholic Insider podcast as good sources.

The broadcast has shades of the old TechTV channel, though the segment was severely hampered by not even listing the blog URLs — nor were they even on the show’s Web site or transcript. Predictably, some bloggers cried foul for bias, and one knocked CNN for referring to many more conservative blogs than liberal ones. Still, the segment is worthwhile despite its shortcomings, even if it only helps Woodruff and other newbies “get” the blogosphere. Of course, the special guest on “Inside Politics” that day, Rev. David O’Connell, president of Catholic University, couldn’t help getting off a dig about the “incivility of blogs” that didn’t respect the pope.

Grade: A for effort, C+ for execution

Today’s Blogs

Slate has made its mark not just with political reporting and insightful features, but with its people-powered aggregators like the groundbreaking Today’s Papers and In Other Magazines. The concept is simple: Have a writer read other media and sum it up in a witty way for the time-challenged consumer. Taking on Weblogs makes a lot of sense for Slate, and they promise in their promos to deliver “Five Million Blogs in Five Minutes.”

Today’s Blogs is a lively read and largely focuses on the most popular A-list bloggers and the memes they are following. The feature, written by rotating interns and editorial assistants, has the disadvantage of trying to sum up millions of blogs in the space of a short column — unlike Today’s Papers’ limited purview of the top stories in the top five newspapers. Worse still is the ethical mire the column descends into by almost always linking to news stories in the Washington Post, the flagship paper of Slate’s new owner. There are plenty of resources such as Daypop Top 40 and Blogdex that can help point the Slate interns to which news stories are most linked in the blogosphere; these should be the ones that get the links from Today’s Blogs.

[Update, 4/6: Slate editor Jacob Weisberg said: “We do NOT have a policy of favoring the Washington Post for newslinks in the body of stories. Our policy is to use whatever story seems best to us, or whichever one has more relevance to the bloggers we’re covering. Apparently, the editorial assistants have been favoring the Post for just the last week. This was not according to our editorial policy, and they won’t be doing it that way any more.”]

Grade: C+ for effort, B+ for execution

CJR Daily’s Blog Report

From the ashes of CJR’s much needed CampaignDesk.org site during the election comes CJR Daily, a continuation of that site with an expanded focus on daily journalism. One of the regular features has been Blog Report, which also has its roots in election coverage and politics. CJR Daily’s managing editor Steve Lovelady has taken heat for saying, “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail,” in reference to bloggers taking down former CNN honcho Eason Jordan.

But that hasn’t stopped Blog Report from being a smart read on chatter in the blogosphere. Sometimes CJR’s rotating writers take on a more patrician tone toward those unruly bloggers, but other times they get into the spirit of things. On the day of the pope’s viewing at the Vatican, for example, Blog Report was agog over the start of the baseball season and how bloggers reacted to the Yankees’ win over the Red Sox. In their defense, though, CJR Daily had a number of other items on papal coverage.

Grade: A- for effort, B+ for execution

Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire

Goddard, an author and political consultant, runs one of the more interesting hybrid aggregator sites, Political Wire. The Front Page is a blog that Goddard maintains with an editorial voice, looking mainly at mainstream news reports on U.S. politics. Then he has two separate automated sections for liberals (“Southpaws”) and conservatives (“Wingers”). Again, the focus is on established A-list bloggers such as Daily Kos and Powerline, but it often has the look of a high-powered group blog, with a clean layout that doesn’t force you to click through to the blog posts themselves. On the pope, Goddard had a nice pointer to “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” an old novel and movie about a Russian pope that foreshadows in many ways the rise of Pope John Paul II. Political Wire does a better job of making sure you don’t miss the top political issues without digging much past the A-list.

Grade: B- for effort, A- for execution

Memeorandum

While programmer Gabe Rivera’s Memeorandum is a fully automated look at the top news stories and blog posts relating to those stories, there is a very human element in Rivera’s choice of which Weblogs to aggregate. While Google News has also made the claim of full automation, we know that some person had to program the software, pick the sources and rank them. Rivera was aggregating in “the low hundreds” of blogs as of last summer, and he mainly focuses on top U.S. news stories and controversial op/ed columns that catch fire in the blogosphere. Rivera maintains that stories are chosen by popularity of links in to them, as are Weblogs, similar to the Technorati system. The page is simple and clean, but the headlines and blurbs don’t always give you an idea of the subject matter. For example, an item on Peter Jennings’ lung cancer originally linked to his bio instead of an AP news story.

Grade: B for effort, A for execution

Kinja

Though it hasn’t received as much attention as Nick Denton’s other blog ventures, Kinja could evolve into a valuable blog aggregator in time. Currently in beta, Kinja allows you to follow various favorite blogs on its site without encumbering you with the nuances of RSS or reader software. As for aggregation, there’s the Editor’s Digests of subjects such as Baseball, Food, Sex and Politics (with Liberal and Conservative subgroupings). A strength of the site is the simple navigation and nice layout for newbies, but its weaknesses are pretty glaring. Technically, headlines spew out in unintelligible bites at times, as do the blurbs from blog posts; editorially, some blogs were miscategorized (e.g. Outside the Beltway in the Liberal section); ethically, you can’t help but sneer at the prominent placement of Denton blogs Gawker, Wonkette, et al. However, in the Editor’s Showcase of good blog writing, there was a recent inclusion of LA.comfidential, a competitor to Denton’s Debaser blog. With some technical attention and a more neutral viewpoint, Kinja could become indispensable.

Grade: C for effort, D for execution, B for potential

Findory

This comes in as perhaps the most high-concept entry. Findory attempts to take the Google News format two steps further — by offering an interface with just news headlines and blurbs, and another with just blogs. But Findory’s most interesting feature is that the weight and placement of stories depends on what you click through to read on repeat visits. There’s even a little icon that comes up next to stories it considers to be of keen interest to you. I decided to have a little fun by clicking on the weirdest news stories relating to aliens and a woman breastfeeding tiger cubs in Myanmar. Sure enough, on future visits, I was presented with more of those types of stories. Findory makes you think before you click through (“will I be permanently tainting future recommendations?”), but still provides you with top world stories despite any fetish you might have for less newsy items. It has a very simple design that could use photos to break it up. And blog posts are sometimes miscategorized by the blogger’s background rather than the subject matter. Otherwise, a fascinating experiment.

Grade: A- for effort, B+ for execution

Which are your favorite blog aggregators, human or automated? Click the button to tell us which ones you like and why.

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Inside Yahoo News: Aggregator brings RSS to the masses

March 31, 2005 by

There are two ways to view Yahoo News. One is to dismiss it as simply a collection of other people’s journalism, slapped together and considered just another feature of a big Internet portal. The other is to sit in awe of a site that includes some of the best journalism created, packages it in a simple way with links to outside sources and balances human judgment with technological innovation.

For the past year, I’ve wanted to peek inside the operation at Yahoo News and see for myself just how they made the sausage. The problem is that Yahoo is the quintessential Silicon Valley company, paranoid about losing its trade secrets or embarrassed that a reporter might be flummoxed that there’s no “there” there.

My plan to visit during the 2004 Summer Olympics was squelched. My plan to visit on U.S. Election Night was squashed. Finally, the opening came when Yahoo News was readying a redesign of the site, its first since 2002. I was invited to sit in on a production meeting related to the redesign — due to launch in public beta today, but now slated for later this month.

Yahoo News lives in Building F on the Yahoo campus, located at the end of a row of shiny modern office parks along Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, Calif. There are security guards stationed at each parking lot, and you must sign a waiver when you check in at the building’s lobby saying you won’t steal trade secrets or photograph anything without written permission. I clumsily went to the wrong entrance of the building, and some employees let me in the locked door as they went out. So much for security.

The office is what you’d expect at a dot-com success story, with brightly painted walls and well-lit, airy spaces. The conference room was named “Gilligan,” and it had purple carpeting and purple seats with yellow piping — the official company colors. Product managers sat alongside engineers and designers and went over the various bugs in the Yahoo News redesign. As an outsider, I could barely follow the stream of technical jargon and nicknames for features.

Someone suggested they “tweak the mocks.” A problem arose over “bread crumbs” being shown. A discussion ensued over renaming the Op/Ed section Opinions or Commentary. On my first look at this redesign, it seemed cleaner and less cluttered — with tabbed navigation at the top instead of the side. (You can see similar tabbed navigation at Yahoo News Asia already.)

Later, Yahoo News product manager Jeff Birkeland gave me a tour of the redesign — forget the building. A new “toggle” feature lets you view the top headlines from each news source under each category (Business, Entertainment, Sports, etc.). But one tab was titled “My Sources,” and that was the magic tab, bringing up your selection of RSS feeds, automatically populated by your RSS feeds chosen from My Yahoo, if you kept a My Yahoo page.

Suddenly, Yahoo News was more than just a collection of licensed content from established news sources — it was every news source and Weblog that had an RSS feed. Personalization had landed at the front door of Yahoo News, after making such a huge splash at the front door of Yahoo itself.

And just as the RSS technology from My Yahoo was being injected into Yahoo News, a beta search technology called Y!Q was also coming to Yahoo News. As you can see in these more crude examples, a highlighted term within a news story brings up a little pop-up box with relevant links on the subject within Yahoo’s own pages and from Web pages outside Yahoo.

Mixing automation with the human touch

Yahoo sits at the intersection of technology and media, fueled by the Internet boom in advertising and paid content and led by a Hollywood studio executive in Terry Semel. Plans are afoot to move most of the editorial operations to the new Yahoo Media Center in Santa Monica, Calif. Though Yahoo spokesmen are relatively tight-lipped about who’s moving when, signs abound that new editorial hires will be heading south. Just today came word through PaidContent.org that Yahoo had hired MSN general manager Scott Moore from Microsoft.

Another of the recent hires was Neil Budde, an online news veteran and the founding editor and publisher of the Wall Street Journal Online. Budde came on last November as the new director of news at Yahoo, taking on editorial and business oversight. Budde told me in a phone interview that he doesn’t find Yahoo News all that different from WSJ.com. And he considered the best difference to be the huge number of engineering resources at Yahoo.

“I think it makes it a lot easier,” Budde said. “One of the reasons I came here is there are so many resources to draw on for all the technology. Plus, with a network like Yahoo, you have so many insights on how people consume news. What’s been great is you have the ability to tie into personalization that’s already been built in My Yahoo, and it allows you to bring in the search capabilities into news, like the Y!Q capabilities. … It’s different than at a traditional news organization where some of those things are harder to build or you’re building it from the ground up.”

While not getting into too many specifics on how the editorial process works — or how many people work at Yahoo News (likely in the dozens and not hundreds) — Budde told me that the team uses a combination of automation and direct human input. There’s a team running Full Coverage, which packages Yahoo content with links to outside news sources and resources on the Web. There’s a team for Sports, for Finance and for the content deal with SBC. There isn’t a 24-hour news team, though many editors have pagers that will go off in case of a breaking story.

“My [past] experience is with more people doing things and less automation, but the folks who have built Yahoo News up ’til this point have done a great job of being very smart about where they can automate and how much they can automate,” Budde said. “That frees up the human editors to do what human editors should do, which is make editorial judgments.”

Budde explained that Yahoo’s longtime partners such as the Associated Press and Reuters have helped streamline the automation process by working closely together with Yahoo News. “Going back many years, when online news was first developing, Yahoo News was one of the first to educate people like Reuters on what’s the best way to build their feeds for online products as automatically as possible,” he said. “So you can be smart about having the human editors do intelligent work on top of that.”

If you assume that the most trafficked Web pages are Yahoo.com, MSN.com and AOL’s proprietary home page, then you can deduce that news headlines on those home pages will generate the lion’s share of traffic to those sites’ news pages. Budde wouldn’t break down exact numbers on originating traffic for Yahoo News but said Yahoo.com, Yahoo search, and My Yahoo are key drivers.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Yahoo News is the second most trafficked News & Information site on the Web — and top Current Events/Global News site — with 20.8 million unique visitors in February 2005. Over the past two years, the site’s traffic has hit peaks and valleys depending on news stories such as U.S. elections and the Southeast Asian tsunami. But generally, traffic has gone from 16-19 million uniques in 2003 to the low 20 millions in 2004, while time spent on the site has gone from the high 20 minutes to low 30s.

One way to build on the time spent on the site is to make the story pages more rich with links to relevant content on other pages, according to Budde. He noted there’s a shift under way for news sites to treat story pages as entry ways for so many people entering via searches.

“People don’t start from the front page, they often start at story pages,” Budde said. “So if this is the first point of entry into our site, what can we do to expose people there to more of what we have available? I think it’s important for any news site. [We want to make] that the central focus, as opposed to so many editors who want to focus on the front page because that’s what the traditional editorial role has been — the front page.”

Taking RSS to the masses

While Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology hasn’t really caught fire in the public consciousness, Yahoo has integrated RSS feeds into its personalized offering, My Yahoo, without really having to explain it. You just add content to your page by topic or by Editor’s Picks — of course, heavily weighted with Yahoo-hosted content.

That integration, started in January 2004, was just one of many announcements by so many online media outlets that have launched RSS feeds or a branded RSS reader. But this move by Yahoo had huge implications, because more than anything else related to RSS, this really did bring RSS to the masses.

“[Yahoo’s] integration of RSS into My Yahoo and Yahoo generally is so profound in terms of what it means for Yahoo,” said John Battelle, author of the upcoming book, “The Search” and founder of the Industry Standard magazine. “Yahoo News, in the Web 1.0 way, was supposed to be your RSS aggregator. Now, they still do Yahoo News, but they’ve given the reins over to users to do feeds that aren’t necessarily blessed by Yahoo.”

So now those feeds have spread from My Yahoo to a mobile service, a desktop ticker and to Yahoo News — probably the most appropriate place for them. Birkeland, the product manager for news at Yahoo, said that they have to perform a balancing act on giving people the content they want without giving them too much to handle.

“You could give people a lot of content, but we want to avoid what we call ‘firehosing’ people,” Birkeland said. “We don’t want to point the firehose at people and let them figure out what’s going on.” But he’s excited about giving people RSS feeds at Yahoo News, which “literally will allow your own choices to exist right in the middle of our front page.”

Still, there are limits. While you can put your feeds into news sections, you still can’t pre-empt the top story of the day. Birkeland says it’s important that Yahoo News still has enough control to convey important breaking news and allow serendipity — so people might learn things from unfamiliar sources and not just from an echo chamber.

While Yahoo News does have its own smallish newsroom in Building F, the operation draws on technology and resources from around the company. Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products at Yahoo, has become known as “The RSS Guy,” bringing feeds to various Yahoo initiatives, including a search engine for RSS feeds, and the Yahoo News redesign. He told me the key to success for winning over the masses was not bothering to even call them “RSS feeds.”

“If you look at how we’ve integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we’re not actually using those three letters very much,” Gatz said. “So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news, here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn’t the important thing. Most of the users don’t want to have to figure that out.”

Skirting legal issues

Gatz says that Yahoo has more people using RSS than any other service, a number of users that’s “in the low millions.” He estimates there are 6 million RSS feeds around the Web. Bloggers take note: When people go to choose RSS feeds at My Yahoo or within Yahoo News, the Yahoo editors suggest various sources, from mainstream news sites to niche content to blogs. Getting into those slots likely will draw more traffic than from any other feed source.

Battelle, who also manages the popular BoingBoing blog, says that he has a contractual deal with Yahoo — with no money changing hands — where Yahoo lists BoingBoing as a feed to add, and BoingBoing has an “Add to My Yahoo” button on its blog. Those buttons are sprouting up like wildflowers on popular blogs now. But Yahoo allows its users to add any feed they want easily, and puts the RSS search engine right on those pages.

While Google was recently sued by Agence France Presse for listing its content in Google News without licensing it, Yahoo News has a deal with AFP and isn’t worried about causing trouble by adding RSS feeds to the mix. Why? Because any source that includes RSS feeds would want to have as many people add them as possible. Just having RSS feeds alone implies an invitation to run headlines on a news reader, Birkeland said.

“There is a clarifying effect of money, that Yahoo is willing to employ [with AFP and others],” Battelle said. “We’re going to syndicate your stuff, and therefore we’re going to pay you for it. And if you have a free RSS feed, we’re going to allow anyone to add it to it.”

While the BoingBoing deal doesn’t include money for placement, that deal is only short term. In the long run, Yahoo might be able to monetize where it places RSS feeds for users to add, just as it eventually charged money for e-mail services, personal ads and personal home pages. Just the fact that Yahoo editors are making a directory of RSS feeds and picking out the best blogs could eventually make it the de facto place for finding and sorting Weblog and niche content.

While a million RSS readers and startup companies have elbowed each other for attention, Yahoo has quietly become the elephant in the room for news feeds.

“We’re the first portal to do anything with RSS, and we’ve now had a year and a half to refine and improve it,” Gatz said. “The ultimate goal was to bring it to the masses, and now that we’ve learned that and made it easy, how do we extend it across the Yahoo network? The concept is powerful, that anyone can subscribe to anything.”

While Yahoo News has a long history of filtering and aggregating content on the Web, the future holds even more promise, with Moore and Budde on board, the resources of a forward-thinking technology company behind them and the new synergized headquarters in Santa Monica. The key will be their balancing act of human editing and automation, of collating content and helping millions understand what’s important in the news today.

* * *

The New Yahoo News
A rundown of some of the new features of the redesign, due for public beta later in April:

  • “Toggle” feature lets you see news headlines from a particular news source at a glance.
  • “My Sources” tab on each section lets you see your RSS headlines — and you can add feeds to the page.
  • Tabbed navigation on top of each page, with more weight and space given to the top story package.
  • Y!Q technology embedded into key words in stories brings pop-up box with links to relevant Yahoo and Web pages.
  • Story pages will have one square ad within story instead of a top and side banner.
  • “IM story” option lets you send a news story via Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service.
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