Chat From the War Zone
Yahoo Inc. has been talking like a major media company. Today it will start acting like one.
Ten months after Lloyd Braun, former chairman of the ABC television network, began plotting the company's content strategy, the Internet giant plans to announce today the first of many original programs expected to come from the Yahoo Media Group headquarters in Santa Monica.
Yahoo, which for years recycled traditional media companies' work on the Web, has hired its first news gatherer. Kevin Sites, who stirred international debate by filming a Marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a Fallouja mosque last fall, will spend the next year reporting from nearly three dozen war zones across the globe.
In an Internet-age twist on the nightly news report, on Sept. 26 he will begin filing video, audio and text dispatches to Yahoo News each day and hold live chat and videoconferencing sessions from the world's most brutal conflicts.
The program, "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," is the clearest evidence yet that Yahoo feels ready to compete with TV networks for viewers and advertisers. A decade after the launch of the first commercial Internet browser, the medium is maturing rapidly enough to pit its biggest players against the giants of other media.
The news business will become the testing ground for entertainment and other content, analysts said, because many of its youngest consumers have turned away from traditional sources.
"It's not that young people aren't interested in news -- it's just that they're increasingly unfulfilled by traditional delivery of news," said Jack MacKenzie, senior vice president of entertainment at Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm. The Kevin Sites program "seems to have all the elements that would be appealing to the millennial generation for which Yahoo is so popular."
Yahoo isn't the only new media company with this idea. Time Warner Inc.'s America Online is also developing original programming, such as "The Biz," an online reality show about the music industry. Years ago, Microsoft Corp. launched the online magazine Slate (now owned by Washington Post Co.) and started the MSNBC cable network with NBC.
The world's biggest media companies are also fighting back. For example, News Corp. has spent about $1.5 billion this year to acquire Internet companies, including the gaming concern IGN Entertainment Inc. and MySpace.com, a popular social-networking site.
