I was surprised to read in a story by Jeff Sonderman at Poynter that the news partnership between Yahoo and ABC News is reaching "the largest digital audience in America" just a year after the partnership was formed. "As of August, the pair reached an online audience of 59.1 million unique visitors, up 11 percent from a year earlier, according to new Nielsen data," Sonderman writes.
I wondered how the two sites–which are said to share stories, videos, and some coverage and bureaus, but maintain separate editorial control–covered science, medicine, and the environment.
ABC News has tabs for "health" and "tech," but no tabs for "science" or "environment." The top stories in health this morning include "Straight Man Lives a Year as Gay Man," "7 Shocking Cases of Extreme Plastic Surgery," and a real stunner, "Urge to Splurge Can Make You Fat." You can also find straightforward stories on the meningitis scare and lead in chickens' eggs. Most of these seem to be original ABC stories. I did find one serious story on privacy issues raised by advances in genetics–but the story was written by Lauran Neergaard of the AP.
The "tech" tab links to a few of what I would call science stories–a story about fossils and the origin of hunting, one about NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, and another on 3-D scans of Stonehenge. These are accompanied by the usual gadget and computer news that you would expect to find in "tech."
I thought I'd look at the Nobel Prize stories, to take one example. The Nobel in medicine appeared in the health section, and the chemisty and physics Nobel stories were slotted into the tech department.
At Yahoo, I found buttons for "science," "health," and "tech" on the home page. Yahoo seemed to have more extensive and more serious health coverage, but almost of it was supplied by Reuters and the AP. I found a similar thing in the science section, where virtually all of the news was supplied by LiveScience.com, SPACE.com, and occasionally the AP and Reuters. I found one story credited to ABC News Blogs. The "tech" stories were all supplied by the AP, Reuters, or such online tech sites as Appolicious and Mashable.
The Nobel Prize stories were written by others, and the top story listed in a search of "Nobel Prize" was "What Nobel Prize Winners Do With Their Money," supplied by LiveScience. Amusing, but not the news.
I didn't see a lot of story sharing between Yahoo and ABC. Instead, I saw ABC stories at ABC news, and everybody else's stories at Yahoo.
Congrats to Yahoo and ABC for reaching the largest digital audience in America, but this doesn't look like a news partnership to me, at least with regard to science and medical stories. It looks like two sites with different approaches to covering the news, and very little sharing of stories.
-Paul Raeburn
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