McClatchy and Yahoo! are going to partner on a new content initiative called “Trusted Voices.” It will feature the foreign correspondents of the McClatchy news service using their original reporting and blogs running on the Yahoo! platform.
In an era when foreign news has largely become a commodity, this seems like a great way to extend the value of McClatchy’s investment in foreign coverage and differentiate it from the pack.
Rather than scale back, McClatchy is finding a way to breath new life into its efforts.
Until we actually see the package online, it’s hard to pass judgment on its true value. I’m not a fan of the name, which sounds a bit too “we’re the journalists and we know better.” That’s not a great value proposition in the era of distributed media where truth is often sussed out among a multitude of voices, but there is value in placing all that content under a single platform.
Who was that editor who made the speech about “When Google and Yahoo start reporting on your city council or sending people to Iraq…”
Yeah, guess he never heard of Kevin Sites, or the Seven Amigos, or this.
Old thinking: Web portals with gobs and gobs of users are the enemy, and we shouldn’t let them repost our headlines.
New thinking: Web portals with gobs and gobs of traffic should be our best frickin’ friends, and we should provide them with original reporting, use their servers to reach readers, get a message out, and drive respect to our brand.
Pretty much.
[…] Media blogger Howard Owens has some thoughts on the arrangement here. In other news, McClatchy lost $280-million in the fourth quarter after taking a writedown on the sale of its largest paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Technorati Tags: media newspapers yahoo | Share This […]
McClatchy has a few bloggers already scattered amongst its bureaus, which I think were inherited from KR. Tim Johnson, the chain’s guy in Beijing, has a good China blog. It’s not clear from the press release what’s going to happen to those established blogs. Johnson’s is a good model to follow.
It sounds like a good direction to move, regardless.