• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, February 2, 2006

Yahoo News has added the weekly advice columnist, Margo Howard, to its short roster of writer/journalists. The news site has also undergone a mild restructuring, featuring popular video more prominently on its home page.

Yahoo News General Manager Neil Budde made the announcements on Wednesday at the Software and Information Association summit in New York. He downplayed Yahoo News' production of original content, emphasizing that Yahoo has no ambitions to challenge fully staffed news organizations with bureaus at home and abroad.

"We're not in competition with content makers," Budde said, explaining that multimedia projects and news stories that are underreported by the mainstream media will remain the focus of any original reporting by Yahoo.

Yahoo News currently features several original finance columns; "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone," which launched in September and documents the travel's of conflict reporter Sites; and the travel show "Richard Bangs' Adventures."

Budde's speech focused primarily on the new media themes he's been pushing since taking charge of Yahoo News in late 2004: Self-contained content bundles like newspapers being replaced by a la carte models; the advent of non-professional news bundlers like bloggers repackaging the news from many different sources; the Web's ability to scale readership and employ targeted advertising in ways that were never possible in print or on television.

"It is possible to start putting a price tag on the bits and bites that make up the Internet," Budde said. The Web, added Budde, is replacing the relatively small number of readers who consumed large bundles of news like newspapers with far more readers who are consuming much smaller bundles--and even individual pieces--of news.

The ability of advertisers to target consumers with specific interests, said Budde, is giving news publishers the ability to more comprehensively report on niche subjects like foreign politics. Twenty percent of the 30 million monthly readers that Yahoo News attracts look at international news, said Budde. "That's six million users--still a big, valuable market for advertisers."

Notably, another subject that Budde discussed on Wednesday--the symbiosis between news aggregators like Yahoo and the news publishers who own the content--was directly challenged this week by the World Association of Newspapers, which represents 18,000 newspapers worldwide including the United States. WAN issued a press release on Tuesday announcing a investigation into what it termed "the exploitation of content by search engines."

Although Larry Kilman, WAN's director of communications, said Yahoo was one of the news aggregators the task force would be investigating, it was unclear whether WAN has accused anyone of anything at this point.

A Yahoo spokesman asserted that Yahoo News only aggregates content from publications with whom it has established relationships, and declined to address WAN's release specifically before more is known about it.

Yahoo News has agreements with approximately 100 news organizations so it can display and link to their content. Budde oversees between 10 and 20 editorial staffers who monitor and repackage the news content that Yahoo's automated system gathers from its content partners. Users also can search through more than 7,000 additional online news sources that Yahoo catalogs for information.

Before joining Yahoo News' handful of writer/journalists, Margo Howard--daughter of the late Ann Landers--penned Slate.com's "Dear Prudence" column. Author and journalist Emily Yoffe has been chosen to carry Prudence's torch at the online general interest magazine. "Dear Margo" will be published online exclusively at Yahoo News, and will be syndicated nationally in over 200 newspapers, through Creators Syndicate.

Attempting to protect its lead in a market prone to change, Budde also discussed several upgrades he envisions for Yahoo News. Yahoo members, for example, will eventually have access to personalized news pages, on which stories are updated based on the viewer's recent viewing habits.

Citing the community editing phenomenon as "the next wave" for Yahoo News, Budde said he is keeping a close eye on news aggregation sites like Digg.com, which call for readers to elect the most interesting reads. Yahoo News currently offers a star system for consumer news prioritizing, but Budde admitted in an interview with OnlineMediaDaily that Digg's system is more intuitive.

Yahoo News drew 27.8 million unique visitors in December of last year--second only to The Weather Channel's 30.5 million--and up 12 percent from 24.7 million in Dec. 2004.

MSNBC also grew 12 percent year-over-year in December--from 21.7 million to 24.4 million. Both CNN.com and AOL News dropped 10 percent, each totaling less than 19.5 million unique visitors. Google News ranked thirteenth.