Every giant website needs a giant partner. Following the lead of AOL’s merger with the Huffington Post, Yahoo will partner — but not merge — with ABC News, allowing the separate organizations to report their online traffic as one ginormous number. Yahoo News already boasts more unique visitors than any other news website, thanks mostly to the highly trafficked Yahoo homepage, which serves as a portal to all of its content. ABC News, on the other hand, does not have the web presence of sites like CNN or MSNBC (numbers two and three in visitors, respectively, behind Yahoo News), but they do have an abundance of resources, most notably video capabilities, which they will now be providing for Yahoo. The sites will have editorial independence, but “integrated bureaus” will be set up in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, allowing the two to better do “massive amount of sharing” and even produce coverage together.
For Yahoo, which has seen its stock prices sink low enough to fire CEO Carol Bartz, the partnership is an injection of validity on the editorial side, which, like AOL, the company has invested in heavily while getting walloped by Google and Facebook on the tech side of things. For its part, ABC News instantly jumps from the bottom of the online legacy news-media pack to the top.
Online shows are also slated, including brand-name hosts like George Stephanopoulos and Christiane Amanpour, while Good Morning America will get a new Yahoo-run website, to be edited by ABC. Just don’t call it a merger.
ABC News and Yahoo News Announce Deal to Share Content [Media Decoder/NYT]
