The search company's planned multimedia news coverage is part of a larger effort to broaden content offerings, officials said.Yahoo has taken its first steps to compete with mainstream media outlets with the hire of Weblog journalist Kevin Sites, who will be specializing in coverage of war and political conflicts for the Internet firm.
Sites is a multimedia journalist who works as a one-man reporting unit, using digital video and satellite upload technology to put his stories online. Most recently, he was a non-embedded correspondent for CNN, reporting from Northern Iraq.
He also spent six months in Afghanistan for NBC and MSNBC News, covering the Northern and Eastern Alliance forces before and after the fall of the Taliban.
In signing on with Yahoo Inc., Sites will be providing coverage of worldwide hot zones exclusively for the Yahoo Media Group. The company said it chose Sites as a reporter because his use of digital technology fit well with a new, larger effort at Yahoo to broaden its content offerings.
"Kevin's approach is very innovative in the field of journalism, and Yahoo is innovative," said the company's vice president of content, Scott Moore.
Sites will have significant creative control over what he wants to report and how he reports on it, Yahoo said. Rather than go after headline-grabbing stories that would compete with stories from mainstream news outlets, Sites said he intends to bring a more personal approach to reporting on conflict.
"We're going to focus on the human narrative," Sites said. "I expect that we'll often be in places where people may not even know there's conflict. Ultimately, we want to create a global snapshot of the world, while putting a human face on what's going on."
The move is expected to spark competition from other Internet content providers, especially Google Inc., America Online and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.
"These companies are the Internet channels for news, much like ABC, CBS and NBC are the channels for broadcast," said Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies. "They've become adept at providing news and weather, with the only real missing component being video."
With Yahoo's move into that realm, Bajarin said he expects that there will be a significant increase in news-related video at many sites. In the past, broadband limitations prevented widespread video use, but as Internet users have ramped up enough in speed, the time seems right for major changes in online news and publishing, he said.
"Videos also used to be more specialized," he said. "For example, Yahoo used to have video, but only for business topics. This is the first time it's expanded into an international zone and broadened its focus."
Although Sites has done traditional media work, it is likely that his credentials and popularity as a blogger also attracted Yahoo, said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review.
"If you have an opportunity to buy an established brand, that's a lot easier than trying to build a readership from scratch," Niles said. "The hiring of Sites is just the latest evidence that if you're publishing online, you need text, audio and video. If you're using just one medium, you're not serving your readership. It's not surprising Yahoo would find someone to bulk up an area where they've been lacking, and that's in video."
In addition to bringing together video and Sites' blog, Yahoo plans to create media-rich packages that put the stories in context. For example, a story about Iraq could include links to other news stories on the conflict, maps of the region and a nod toward other blogs that discuss the war.
Moore said Yahoo expects that such multilayered coverage will likely attract younger people to its programming. "This is the type of reporting that will draw people who don't typically watch the evening news or go on a news site," he said.
Moore said Yahoo also hopes to attract traditional news outlets, which would pay to license the content for their own sites, or use a portion of Sites' video on their broadcasts.
Although it's part of a larger effort, Sites' reportage is not the first brick in a news empire, Moore said. "This is the first of many major initiatives that will be coming out of the Yahoo Media Group within the next few months," he said. "But we're not staffing up to be a news-gathering organization. Instead, we're focusing on creating content that's exclusive to Yahoo, and tailored for the medium."
