The war correspondent reporting effort “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone” will be syndicated for print by Scripps Howard.
In the Editors Weblog article about the deal between Yahoo and Scripps Howard, the writer wonders if newspapers will become simply news aggregators. This has been happening for years; the author should pick up a Knight Ridder published newspaper in a city like the Murdok home of Lexington to see it in action.
David Johnson, who works for Scripps Howard, blogged about the agreement on Lost Remote:
I took the two giant steps down the hall to talk to Peter Copeland, Editor and General Manager of Scripps Media Center and SHNS, earlier today about the deal so we could offer you a peek behind the curtains here. It’s an interesting look at how two unlikely bedfellows, an emerging online content supercenter and a century-old Washington wire, got together.
Copeland said it took a while to get the right people talking, but once the conversation started, the ball rolled pretty fast. An interesting quirk was that no one ever spoke in the process: everything was done over e-mail (well almost everything, there was one phone call). SHNS is not selling its wire to Yahoo! at present. Yahoo! News is given full contributor status and sourceline credit, just like a member newspaper.
Hot Zone won’t be the first web-to-print syndication deal. HuffingtonPost worked out a similar arrangement with the Tribune Company back in June.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
