It's bothered me for ages that media keep reporting that Google and Yahoo are media companies. Afterall, Yahoo is a slef declared lifestyle engine. The reason is bugs me is that determining a company is a media company on the basis that they make revenue from advertising seems pretty narrow. What about content creation? Reporting? All that other good stuff. Aren't they merely content repackagers with little IP in content creation?
Anyway, enough of the rant... Seems Yahoo is about to head - albeit in a very small way - down the road to being a media company. The NYT reports that they are appointing a Journo to start covering, of all things wars:
The Web site, called "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" will focus entirely on Mr. Sites's travels as a war correspondent and will use nearly every kind of format the Internet allows. His reports will begin Sept. 26.
Mr. Sites, who is 42, has long been comfortable using new technology and the Internet as part of his reporting, from shooting his own video to writing blogs from places like Kosovo and Afghanistan. The use of technology, he said, allows him "to report in ways that haven't been done routinely in the network news business."
They point out that this isn't a Blog, V/Blog or any such thing. No, no, no...
Mr. Sites said he hoped that Yahoo users understood that what he was doing was different from the mass of opinion blogs and other Web sites.
"We are a journalistic entity," he said, "trying to do things in a responsible way you don't always see on the Internet.
So there you go. The Internet company doesn't want to be like Web 2.0. It wants to be like, well, The New York Times...
