YAHOO! THE NEXT GEN MEDIA COMPANY? TIME WARNER OF THE 21ST CENTURY?

It's been hectic with GoingOn's beta launch and other projects happening, so I haven't had a chance to blog much or write for my AlwaysOn column in almost two months. I feel really bad since my editor, Jill, has been asking every week and I keep pushing back on this.

Anyway, today I'm checking my Yahoo! email account, which I probably check every other day, and I come across a promotion for "Kevin Site in the Hot Zone"... "One man. One year. A world of conflict." The email reads:

Join award-winning journalist Kevin Sites as he spends one year reporting directly from more than 20 of the world's armed conflicts, uncovering the stories you may not find anywhere else. Get the untold story now.

After reporting from Somalia, Kevin Sites is now en route to his next hot zone: Northern Uganda. For more than 20 years, it has been the scene of brutal conflict between the Ugandan government and a warlord's resistance army.

Follow Kevin Sites as he reports from these conflicts: (map of various locations)

I remember reading about Kevin Sites before and came across some criticism of his journalistic method and integrity. But this is not what came to mind. It is better that I checked out his blog/news site today rather than a few weeks back because all of Yahoo!'s recent activities puts this in a different perspective for me.

They've incorporated blogs into their news search, launched their beta Yahoo! Podcasts (yikes! first wave gets "googled" and now some startups might get "yahooed"), started new search services, and now the promotion of a journalist's blog as another big step towards this new wave of user-generated content. Well, Kevin Sites's blog isn't a typical personal blog, so maybe call it a "small media" service? I don't know what I should call it, but I just found it very interesting that they have signed up and started to promote a blogger. Who's next? Will this be a new trend that will spread to mainstream media outlets? Maybe things will never completely move towards a long-tail model of content distribution, but just a long tail of content creation that allows major media outlets more choice to pick the best of what's out there? Who knows. The space is too early to tell, but I definitely give props to Yahoo!.


[tags: yahoo, yahoo!, podcasts, longtail, media]