Next Stop For Yahoo's Sites: The U.S.
- by Mark Walsh @markfwal, August 11, 2006
After spending the last year hopscotching among the world's war zones, Sites is expected to shift back to the United States to cover high-impact stories domestically for the second installment of "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone." While the exact format and nature of the show's next incarnation is yet to be defined, Yahoo News General Manager Neil Budde says he believes Sites' up-close-and-personal reporting style would fit well with domestic coverage.
"I think the stories about people and about the human condition seem to resonate very well with our readers and there are many of those stories to be told in the U.S.," says Budde. A Yahoo spokesman also notes that Sites's audience skews heavily toward the United States. The show has had about 1 million U.S. users a month since its launch last September--drawing 1.2 million in July, according to comScore Media Metrix. Comscore said they don't have global figures for the Sites site.
Budde says Sites, who is now in the Middle East covering the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, has also expressed a desire to bring his brand of backpack journalism to the United States. But details such as whether the show would change its name and exactly when its second "season" will debut haven't yet been nailed down. "We're still shaping what the coverage will be in the coming year," says Budde.
"Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" was one of Yahoo's initial experiments with original content last year, along with the travelogue "Richard Bangs' Adventures," which Yahoo began offering last October. Bangs was previously a host on MSN Travel and producer of MSNBC's "Great Escapes."
But in March, Yahoo Media Group head Lloyd Braun said the company was scaling back its efforts to create original programs, and would instead rely more on material from other media companies or consumer-generated content.
Indeed, Budde indicated that the future of the Richard Bangs show, which has attracted only about 500,000 users--not even enough to be counted by Nielsen//NetRatings--is up in the air. "We're continually evaluating all the stuff we do and trying to figure out what is the right mix," he said.
Going forward, Budde said that Yahoo News was likely to adapt third-party media for the Web rather than pursue completely original projects. "Probably more of what we'll do is create original news packages with partners," he said. As an example, he cited Yahoo's partnership earlier this year with CBS to offer expanded "60 Minutes" segments on Yahoo that include un-aired footage and interactive additions.
Without a "60 Minutes"-like audience, meanwhile, the Sites show has struggled to attract significant advertising. Other than a sponsorship by the film "Syriana" last year, "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" hasn't drawn any advertising exclusive to the site. Display advertising on the Hot Zone is sold as part of the overall inventory across Yahoo News. The expected shift to a focus on domestic news by the show could help to draw a wider pool of advertisers than its current war zone coverage.
Despite its modest audience, the Sites project--which combines video, photos, articles and interactive features--has drawn praise from the journalism establishment. Writing in the New Yorker last month, Nicholas Lemann, head of Columbia's journalism school, mentioned the Sites show as one of a few online outlets that "consistently offer good journalism that has a distinctly Internet, rather than repurposed, feeling."
In that regard, Budde said the Hot Zone "has helped to establish our news credibility from where it was before."
