The latest and perhaps broadest effort yet in democratizing the news is under way at Yahoo, which on Tuesday will introduce a news blog that will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media.
Search-generated content has been growing on the Internet, linked to the success of companies like Associated Content, which Yahoo recently bought, and Demand Media, which has used freelance writers to create an online library of more than a million instructional articles.
But the use of search data has been limited more to the realm of “how to” topics like “How do I teach my dog sign language?” than questions about the news of the day like “Where does Elena Kagan stand on corporate campaign donations?”
Yahoo software continuously tracks common words, phrases and topics that are popular among users across its vast online network. To help create content for the blog, called The Upshot, a team of people will analyze those patterns and pass along their findings to Yahoo’s news staff of two editors and six bloggers.
The news staff will then use that search data to create articles that — if the process works as intended — will allow them to focus more precisely on readers.
“We feel like the differentiator here; what separates us from a lot of our competitors is our ability to aggregate all this data,” said James A. Pitaro, vice president of Yahoo Media. “This idea of creating content in response to audience insight and audience needs is one component of the strategy, but it’s a big component.”
Quick Note: One thing we would like to see is links or embedded access to the primary documents that the news stories refer to. That's adding a lot of value in terms of saving time and finding, linking to documents that might be difficult to find, and providing access to the unfiltered info.
Yes, we will admit it. This was one of the key ideas we used when developing DocuTicker, ResourceShelf's sister site that we continue to use today.
This idea is also works with multimedia. If President Obama makes a speech at 2pm by 2:45 pm news stories with links (often hand selected) to the text transcript and audio/video of the speech should be part of the full package.
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