Yahoo, ABC News To Form Mega Online News Site
Combined news operations will far exceed nearest rival in web viewership.
| Posted Monday, Oct. 3, 2011, at 1:10 PM
Photo by Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images
The world’s most-visited online news site is joining forces with the organization fond of claiming that more Americans get their news from it than from any other source.
Yahoo announced Monday that it has signed a deal with ABC News to feature the network’s original content on its Yahoo News website. Under the agreement, ABC News journalists such as Christiane Amanpour, Katie Couric, and Barbara Walters will produce video directly for the web, to be used on the Yahoo News site as well as ABC sites.
The partnership kicked off Monday with a new, more interactive GoodMorningAmerica.com site hosted by Yahoo. And at 2:35 p.m. ET, ABC News.com and Yahoo!News.com will live stream an interview of President Obama by George Stephanopolous. Obama wants to talk about his proposed $447 billion jobs bill, USA Today reports.
Couric told the Associated Press the partnership presents an"“incredible opportunity to do extended interviews" without the constraints of "TV time."
While the two organizations will maintain editorial control of their own respective Web sites, they will co-produce coverage of major news and integrate their bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, Reuters reports. Their combined traffic will exceed that of their closest rival, CNN.com, by 25 million visitors. "What advertiser doesn’t want to be associated with this team?" said Ross Levinsohn, executive vice president of Yahoo! Americas.
Yahoo hasn’t had much cause to celebrate lately. The company unceremoniously dumped CEO Carol Bartz last month amid an ongoing struggle to keep up with fast-growing rivals such as Google and Facebook.
