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March 28, 2024

McClatchy and Yahoo Partner on “International Voices”

Important Details: From Cairo, from Beijing, from Baghdad and from Jerusalem, McClatchy’s global bureau reporters will now offer news and perspectives, some of it exclusively through Yahoo! News. The new joint venture is named International Voices.  As part of the initiative, McClatchy will provide some of its global reporting to Yahoo! News, for display on the Yahoo! site. Those stories will also appear in McClatchy newspapers and on the traditional newswires, including McClatchy Tribune News Wire and the Scripps Howard wire. In addition, correspondents will provide blog commentary on their experiences exclusively on Yahoo! News. The project will start in April.

Announcement of the initiatives follows closer cooperation between newspaper companies and Yahoo! Ten newspaper companies have now agreed to partner with Yahoo! in the recruitment business, using Yahoo! Hot Jobs as an online help wanted platform. In previous agreements, a number of newspaper companies have provided full-text news content — usually national or international, but not local — to Yahoo!, although some have since abandoned that program.

Yahoo! itself has made several forays into original content, most of it in the entertainment area. A 2006 Yahoo!-produced feature, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone, followed the multimedia reports of a former CNN reporter in Iraq. No financial terms for the initiative were announced.

In Outsell’s Opinion: The International Voices announcement is another acknowledgment that newspaper companies need the major channels of online distribution.

In this case, McClatchy, like other large newspaper companies, has struggled to maintain a global presence. A country at war may need extensive and diverse global coverage, but international bureaus have been one of the casualties of newspapers’ flagging revenues. If McClatchy, the third largest US publisher, can help pay those correspondents — and keep them in place — then this kind of distribution arrangement may be a win-win one. And if McClatchy can drive more traffic to its sites or take significant advertising revenues from related Yahoo! pages, then we’ll see this model expand. Already, members of the newspaper consortium are negotiating an enlargement of their HotJobs partnership with Yahoo!. Expect to see a lot more of this kind of news and blog sharing.

Further, it’s a sign that you can segment news. By having its correspondents create a different segment of content — blog perspectives — McClatchy is magnifying the value of those correspondents. That too is a lesson smart publishers are learning well.