Yahoos and the news

When I emailed staff about "Yahoo" and "local news," I'm sure they thought I took another one of those phone calls from people who shall we say are "enthusiastic" about how wrong we are.

But it was about the real "Yahoo," you know the multi-billion corporation. In an interview with Dow Jones news, the new CEO Hilary Schneider said the company is looking to extend the "lens of local" across all of its programming. Yahoo already has deals with local newspapers to carry their content and provide to Yahoos everywhere.

Any astute Web observer knows for example, you can get "Mankato news" on a Google News service or as a Google alert. The news you usually get is from a Free Press story that has been posted online. Google scans Web sites with a "crawler" and then provides the link to anyone who says they would like local news.

Unfortunately, Google does not pay us for use of our copyrighted material, but they do link directly to our site, which increases our number of page views and theoretically revenue from advertisers.

Why don't we sue? 1. It's very expensive to fight a multi-billion corporation like Google. 2. We don't feel directing people to our Web site damages us. In fact, one could argue, it's good for us.

We do, on occasion, find a Web site that has just cut and pasted our story into their own Web site. That's when we raise a fuss.

But back to Yahoo. They're trying to make inroads with various partners into local news. Might they be able to recruit "citizen" journalists to "populate" a local news site with "news" or at least information they have come up with. Might these people be inclined to work for free or a cut of the ad revenues?

A thousand citizen journalists working two-hours a week, equals 2,000 hours of news reporting, more than the local newspaper.

Craigslist operates on the notion that people will use it, for free, and that is the content that drives the business or desire for advertisers to be on the site. Craig basically gets his content for free or virtually free. Could a news site like Yahoo do a version of Craigslist as a local free place for information?

My question to the staff is: How would we, as professional journalists, newspaper managers, combat that prospect?

The answer might be to recruit our own band of citizen journalists to provide hyper local information. That is a strategy some newspapers are already using.