International news items created by McClatchy foreign correspondents will be added as ‘Trusted Voices’ to Yahoo News.
Global newsmaking places like the Middle East and China should be more complete in the eyes of Yahoo News readers with the expanded coverage Yahoo plans to offer.
Their deal with The McClatchy Company brings the professional knowledge of foreign correspondents to reside alongside regularly reported news. Regional blog reports from them will accompany select stories and deliver an in-person perspective to their stories.
When Trusted Voices debuts, one of their first efforts involves news coverage of stories in Iraq. An ‘Inside Iraq’ blog written by Baghdad-based McClatchy staffers from the area. They also expect contributions from other Middle East correspondents in Cairo, Jerusalem, and other places in the region.
When the new effort launches from Iraq and other places, it will represent something of a return to the past for Yahoo News. For a brief period, the site experimented with having blog content accompany stories from traditional news sources.
That project ended abruptly a year later in October 2006, without comment from Yahoo. Blogs that enjoyed some visibility on the heavily visited Yahoo News site have yet to see the company return that model to active use.
Yahoo has made use of correspondents itself, in an effort to add original content during former Yahoo executive Lloyd Braun’s tenure overseeing Yahoo’s media efforts. War correspondent Kevin Sites spent a year contributing to Yahoo’s Hot Zone, traveling the globe to various sites of conflict.
Little has been done with Hot Zone since then. The McClatchy deal looks like a way to recapture that type of commentary in a complementary format rather than as standalone reporting pieces.
