Type of site News Created by Yahoo Commercial Yes | Owner Yahoo Website news.yahoo.com Registration Optional | |
 | ||
Yahoo! News originated as an internet-based news aggregator by Yahoo. Articles originally came from news services such as the Associated Press, Reuters, Fox News, Al Jazeera, ABC News, USA Today, CNN.com, BBC News, etc.
Contents
In 2001, Yahoo! News launched the first "most-emailed" page on the web. It was a well-received innovative idea, expanding on how computers could be used to do things in a society.
Yahoo allowed comments for news articles until December 19, 2006, when commentary was disabled. Comments were re-enabled on March 2, 2010. Comments were temporarily disabled between December 10, 2011, and December 15, 2011, due to glitches.
In June 2011, Yahoo! News was rebuilt using an internal content management system called the Yahoo Publishing Platform. The same platform now powers Yahoo! News in the following regions and languages: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, English, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Spanish (US), English (US), Venezuela, Hong Kong, English (India), Marathi, Tamil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
By 2011, Yahoo had expanded its focus to include original content, as part of its plans to become a major media organization. Veteran journalists (including Walter Shapiro and Virginia Heffernan) were hired, while the website had a correspondent in the White House press corps for the first time in February 2012. An Amazon-owned marketing data collection company (Alexa) claimed Yahoo! News one of the world's top news sites, at this point.
Plans were made to add a Twitter feed. In November, 2013, Yahoo hired former Today Show and CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric as Global Anchor of Yahoo! News.
Yahoo! Celebrity
Yahoo! Celebrity (as omg!) debuted on June 12, 2007 with little fanfare, with the original press release being published on Yahoo!'s corporate blog. Upon launch, MediaWeek reported that Yahoo is hoping to skew more toward a female demographic with omg!, and that Unilever, Pepsi, and Axiata (Celcom & XL) will be the sole official sponsors of the website. Due to heavy publicity on Yahoo's front page and with its partnerships, readership took off, with four million readers logging on to omg! in the first 19 days alone. As of autumn 2007, omg! registered over eight million readers a month, and is the second most-read gossip website in the United States, ahead of People and behind TMZ.com.
In December 2012, Yahoo! reached a deal with CBS Television Distribution to cross-promote its Entertainment Tonight spin-off The Insider with omg!, re-branding the show as omg! Insider.
In January 2014 it was announced that CBS Television Distribution was to revert the name change back to The Insider while omg! changes its name to Yahoo! Celebrity.
Mobile application
Yahoo! developed an application that collects the most-read news stories from different categories for iOS and Android. The app was one of the winners of 2014 Apple Design Awards.
Ranking
As of November 2014, Yahoo! News ranked second among global news sites, after reddit.com and ahead of CNN, according to Alexa.
Criticism
Yahoo! News has been criticized for occasionally reporting false, sensationalistic, and poorly-written news as fact, or falsifying and sensationalizing headlines of re-aggregated news to bait readers. This has lead these misleading stories to be spread and republished by other magazines and newspapers as fact. A well-known instance of this happening was in the case of an article published in 2003 about supposed time traveller Andrew Carlisson, which was originally found on satirical website Weekly World News. Another instance of Yahoo! News spreading false or unverifiable information happened during the 2016 presidential elections when Yahoo was accused of spreading an article originally published by IBTimes but with a falsified and misleading headline- the article, originally titled Latest 2016 Popular Vote Election Results: Clinton Leads Trump By 2.6 Million, Margin Grows As Votes Continue To Be Counted was re-titled as Hillary Clinton Gets More Votes Than Any Candidate Ever. Yahoo! News removed the article after some backlash but did not retract the falsified headline, according to the Daily Wire.