On a recent visit to Los Angeles, BoomTown stopped in at the Santa Monica HQ of Docstoc, a start-up aimed at document-sharing online.
I have long been interested in the next paradigm for all sorts of publishing.
And Docstoc is certainly among the more innovative sites, letting users store, search and share business, legal and tech-related documents for free.
Here’s a video tour of the start-up.
In a risky but interesting move that has some at the company nervous and others excited, Yahoo is in the process of moving key development responsibility for its juggernaut Yahoo News unit to Taiwan.
Under the new system, product management, engineering and user interface design for one of Yahoo’s flagship properties will become the responsibility of staffers there.
Editorial employees for Yahoo News–which is the No. 1 news site on the Web with 48.4 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore data –will remain in the U.S., largely located at its Santa Monica, Calif., office.
Yahoo confirmed the change to BoomTown yesterday.
Starting today and through next week, BoomTown is headed south down California’s lovely Highway 1 for as much of a vacation as I can possibly take.
Which is to say, just a week off from posting.
In other words: Partovis, Wenda, Owen, play nice! Yahoos, please hold your internal memos. And I hope Apple’s tablet is not delivered from on high this week while I relax beachside (it won’t be).
Well, this unusual video by Demand Media is certainly a unique effort to get freelancers to consider doing work for its Demand Studios.
In it, staffers at the Santa Monica, Calif.-based network of social networking sites and apps maker went full Van Halen–with a celebrity assist by a leather-clad Brooke Burke, who runs the ModernMom site on Demand.
While the current meme is that traditional journalism is getting the stuffing knocked out of it by the digital onslaught, it neglects to notice that a lot of really sharp news reporters are actually getting some real traction by finally starting to be serious about creating online sites that are designed to compete.
As case in point, BoomTown recently visited the offices of TheWrap.com, a Web blog aimed at dominating breaking news about the business of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.
Last year, Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider and then-Media Group head Scott Moore had a summery seaside dinner with Demand Media co-founder and CEO Richard Rosenblatt in Santa Monica, Calif., right around the corner from the online publishing company’s HQ.
While many speculated that Yahoo could be doing some friendly kibitzing to get a sense of where the eclectic network of general- and special-interest sites was headed, for a possible acquisition, nothing came of it.
But now, a year later, with recent indications that a major strategy for new CEO Carol Bartz will finally follow through on making Yahoo’s massive but disparate service more social, especially in its content offerings, several sources close to the company tell me another look-see at Demand is likelier than ever.
Former Yahoo COO and current Quadrangle Group partner Dan Rosensweig will take over as CEO and president of Activision Blizzard’s powerful Guitar Hero franchise, according to sources close to the situation.
Rosensweig will run the hot gaming company’s division, located in Silicon Valley, for Activision head Bobby Kotick.
The pair know each other well, since Kotick served on Yahoo’s board for many years when Rosensweig was a key exec there. He’s also just the kind of consumer Web exec that Kotick has been looking for to turbocharge the largely retail Guitar Hero business online.
Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo’s general manager and executive editor of news, is set to leave his job–right in the midst of a major restructuring of its media unit–to work at Hearst Corp.
Khemlani’s departure could be announced to his staff at Yahoo as early as today.
While Khemlani was in line to head one of the three main prongs of the new content organization, running a possible network programming arm, sources inside and outside Yahoo said he instead has opted to take a job as VP and Special Assistant to the CEO for Digital Media at Hearst.
Besides the more massive management reorganization that new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz could announce this week, as BoomTown reported on Friday, the Internet company’s powerful media arm might also see a drastic shift in management structure even sooner.
According to several sources inside the company, U.S. Audience SVP Jeff Dossett has been working on the changes for a while, part of an overall change in how Yahoo makes and delivers content.
Under a plan being considered, the media unit will be split into three parts: vertical programming, network programming and search monetization.
Will Yahoo’s media properties fall flat with sweeping new changes that are afoot that will drastically change the way the company bakes its content offerings?
Or will the ability to have a single, highly scaleable, centrally developed architecture make the media programming Yahoo delivers more responsive and flexible in the era of fast-twitch bloggers (all while cutting costs)?
According to many sources inside and outside the company, product development for Yahoo’s heavily trafficked media operations–including its powerful News, Finance and Sports sites–is set to be moved under Ash Patel, who is EVP of the company’s Audience Product Division.
In an interesting and innovative move compared to what has typically been less-than-hip online programming over the years, Microsoft’s MSN service is debuting a slick new celebrity site called Wonderwall today–created, designed and produced by a Hollywood company run by former Yahoo media chief and well-known television exec Lloyd Braun.
Using an unusual horizontal design with a scrolling “wall,” a plethora of pictures and a deeply visual sensibility, it’s definitely a laudable risk for Microsoft, as the company seeks to continue to push itself into the online content business, despite a lackluster record.
But will this time be wonderful?
There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore. The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post about how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” at its Santa Monica media unit offices. The piece also included old allegations from a devastating story in November of 2005 about Braun, which made him look like a digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.” Unfortunately, as BoomTown has found out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him don’t actually check out. And therein lies a complex tale that still reverberates at Yahoo today.
While recently in Los Angeles, I paid another visit on Jason Kilar, who has been quietly making the Hulu premium online video service one of the brightest spots in the Web 2.0 space. The joint venture between News Corp. and General Electric media unit NBC Universal has shown an astonishing growth since its launch in late 2007. Yesterday, for example, comScore reported that it had risen to No. 6 in online video market share in October, after big players like Google’s YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo and in front of Disney and AOL. Here’s my latest video interview with Kilar about it all.
As BoomTown reported earlier today in detail, Yahoo will announce its layoffs on Wednesday, as planned, of at least 1,500 employees. But many staff have also been leaving Yahoo on their own, including one recent high-profile departure–now former Yahoo Media Group SVP Scott Moore. Here’s my version on an exit interview with Moore, which I did at his Yahoo going-away party last week in Santa Monica.
Aside from upcoming layoffs, it seemed as if Yahoo had stanched the flow of major execs from the company.
Not so, it seems, as sources with knowledge of the situation confirm that the two top execs of the troubled Internet company’s media unit will be announcing their departures later this week.
SVP Scott Moore, who runs Yahoo’s media group out of its offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and also Al Warms, who came to Yahoo from its BuzzTracker acquisition last year, will both be leaving, although it is not clear what their plans are.
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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