• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 24, 2006

Yahoo News and CBS Corp. will produce a co-branded Web site dedicated to "60 Minutes," the companies said Thursday. The deal reflects a willingness by networks and the Web portal to combine each other's strengths for their mutual benefit--in this case, CBS's prized content for Yahoo's community-building tools, infrastructure, and Web traffic.

The full-blown offering is not expected until September, but Yahoo is planning to launch a preview site following this Sunday's "60 Minutes." Buick is sponsoring the online preview site, which will feature 23 short clips of footage from Ed Bradley's interviews with Tiger Woods.

Beginning next season, several dedicated staffers within CBS and Yahoo News will assemble two news packages per week. One will expand on a particular segment featured on the show that week, while the other explores a current topic in the news using more than 50 years of "60 Minutes" news archives.

"Partnering with CBS represents our continued efforts to work with publishers of great content," said Neil Budde, Yahoo News general manager. "It's not only the Web presence we provide, but our community building interactive tools that can add value to a network's content."

And while it has yet to be determined whether Morley Safer and the other muckrakers at "60 Minutes" will have to keep a blog, Budde is promising interactive elements such as maps, reporter's notebooks, blogs, and photo galleries. Most packages, he added, will be a combination of new and archival video footage.

Budde also predicted that individual advertisers will sponsor the microsite on either a weekly or monthly basis.

Since taking charge of Yahoo News in late 2004, Budde has attempted to embody new media themes, including 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; and the Web's ability to scale readership and employ targeted advertising in ways that were never possible in print or on television.

He also consistently discourages the idea that Yahoo is competing against news organizations like CBS.