Yahoo, McClatchy link for news
NEW YORK -- Yahoo Inc. said it signed a deal to feature foreign news from McClatchy Co. on Yahoo News, in another move in favor of cooperation for the Internet and newspaper companies.
The project, to be called "Trusted Voices," will put traditional news and feature stories as well as exclusive blog reports from McClatchy foreign correspondents based in places like the Middle East, China, and Latin America on Yahoo's news portal, the most visited news site on the Internet. McClatchy and Yahoo, which licenses most of the content on Yahoo News, declined to discuss terms of the deal.
For Yahoo, the alliance means more and richer content at a time when there is significant reader interest in foreign news, particularly on the war in Iraq. Yahoo will feature the "Inside Iraq" blog written by native Iraqi staffers in McClatchy's Baghdad bureau.
Yahoo expects McClatchy's content to help satisfy reader appetite, particularly by providing perspective on the news beyond breaking-news coverage from wire services, now the backbone of its "World News" section, said Neil Budde, editor in chief of Yahoo news, finance, and sports. World News is consistently among the site's three most-visited categories, he said.
McClatchy, which owns 31 daily newspapers, including the Miami Herald, the Sacramento Bee, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, should benefit from a significantly wider online audience.
Yahoo News has long been the most visited news site on the Web. It had 36.2 million visitors in February, up 37 percent from the same month a year ago, according to research firm comScore Networks Inc. McClatchy's sites together ranked number 10 in February with 6.6 million visitors, almost triple a year ago, before McClatchy purchased and began operating most of Knight Ridder's newspapers.
Newspaper companies initially regarded the Internet as a threat to business, as the Web siphoned ad dollars and readers from the daily paper. But more recently, newspaper companies have been willing to form partnerships with their rivals, and have been testing joint advertising partnerships in areas such as help-wanted classified ads and local Internet search.
