Yahoo News originated as a pure Internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo.
It categorized news into "Top Stories", "U.S. National", "World", "Business",
"Entertainment", "Science", "Health", "Weather", "Most Popular", "News
Photos", "Op/Ed", and "Local News," a format it still largely uses today.
Articles in Yahoo News originally came from news services, such as Associated
Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Fox News, ABC News, NPR, USA Today,
CNN.com, CBC News, Seven News, and BBC News.
In 2001, Yahoo News launched the first "most-emailed" page on the web. The idea
was created and implemented by Yahoo software engineer Tony Tam.
Yahoo allowed comments for news articles until December 19, 2006, when commentary
was disabled. Comments were re-enabled on March 2, 2010. Comments were
temporarily disabled between December 10, 2011, and December 15, 2011, due to
glitches. In June 2011, Yahoo News was rebuilt
using an internal content management system called the Yahoo Publishing
Platform. The same platform now powers Yahoo News in the following regions and
languages: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, English, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru,
Spanish, English, Venezuela, Hong Kong, English, Marathi, Tamil, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
and the United Kingdom. Since 2011, Yahoo has expanded its focus
to include original content, as part of its plans to become a major media
organization. Veteran journalists, including Walter Shapiro and Virginia
Heffernan, were hired, while the website had a correspondent in the White House
press corps for the first time in February 2012. Alexa lists Yahoo News as
one of the world's top news sites. On August 29, 2012, Yahoo News fired
Washington bureau chief David Chalian after he made a disparaging comment
about Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his wife Ann Romney
during the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. With
Hurricane Isaac entering Louisiana, Chalian suggested that "They're not
concerned at all. They're happy to have a party with black people drowning".
According to an interview with Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer Yahoo News will start
displaying Twitter updates alongside news on both Desktop and Mobile in the
United States in May 2013. In November 2013, Mayer announced Yahoo
had hired former CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric as Global Anchor of Yahoo
News. Yahoo! Celebrity
Yahoo! Celebrity as omg! debuted in June 2007 with little fanfare, with the
original press release being published on Yahoo!'s corporate blog. Upon launch,
MediaWeek reported that Yahoo is hoping to skew more toward a female demographic
with omg!, and that Unilever, Pepsi, and Axiata will be the sole official
sponsors of the website. Due to heavy publicity on Yahoo's front page and with
its partnerships, readership took off, with four million readers logging on to
omg! in the first 19 days alone. As of autumn 2007, omg! registered over eight
million readers a month, and is the second most-read gossip website in the
United States, ahead of People and behind TMZ.com.
In December 2012, Yahoo! reached a deal with CBS Television Distribution to
cross-promote its Entertainment Tonight spin-off The Insider with omg!,
re-branding the show as omg! Insider. In January, 2014 it was announced that
CBS Television Distribution was to revert the name change back to The
Insider while omg! changes its name to Yahoo! Celebrity.
Mobile application Yahoo! developed an application that
collects the most-read news stories from different categories for iOS and
Android. The app was one of the winners of 2014 Apple Design Awards.
Ranking As of November 2014, Yahoo News ranked
second among global news sites, after reddit.com and ahead of CNN, according
to Alexa. References
External links Yahoo News
Yahoo! News on Google+ "More on Google News and Yahoo News"
"Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories"
"Columbia Journalism Review News Frontier Database"
Nieman Journalism Lab. "Yahoo". Encyclo: an Encyclopedia of the Future of News.
Retrieved 1 April 2012.