News and "People Like That": Carol Bartz Q & A
With Hilary Schneider gone and all kinds of questions being raised about Yahoo’s going-forward commitment (good Alan Mutter post) to the Newspaper Consortium, consider CEO Carol Bartz’s recent comments.
Well, worth reading USA Today’s David Lieberman’s interview with Bartz, here. The questions help define the terrain of the day, even if the answers are less than conclusive and, added up, still fall short of answering the question of what Yahoo is, now that it is grown-up.
Here’s the local question, and answer, and how Yahoo works with “people like that,” uh, the news industry.
Q: You are starting a local news operation for San Francisco. Tell us about your plans to offer local information.
A: We all live in a place. You live in small communities, and you are very interested in what happens in those communities from police blotters to what happened in the city council or the neighborhood watch. It is interesting to the consumer.
And it is interesting to the advertiser because it is the ultimate target. Statistics are 95% of our purchases are (made) within 2 miles of our house, 5 miles of our house.
Q: There are a lot of people in local news. AOL has Patch. Local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations are online. Where do you fit in?
A: We have partnerships with local publications and an association with newspapers. They send us news feeds. We send viewers back to their dot-com locations. So we actually are very symbiotic with people like that.
But to answer more the spirit of your question, why can we succeed? I will give you the CEO answer: We do a better job. A better job in being a partner with local advertisers. A better job partnering with people actually writing from the community, not about the community. We have a lot of experience in this.