AT&T-Yahoo! Startpage a Model for Newspapers

I was just speaking with someone about online newspaper strategies and we were discussing the opportunity for newspapers in the Yahoo! consortium – now more than 500 local papers – to create a co-branded local portal in each market modeled on the AT&T-Yahoo! startpage (for ISP subscribers).

The difference is that it wouldn’t be the default homepage that users saw when they fired up their browsers, so it wouldn’t get the “automatic traffic” the AT&T-Yahoo! startpage enjoyed. But the concept is still interesting and valid.

Newspapers and Yahoo! would jointly provide content and services to offer local users a broad range of content and functionality – kind of like a local Yahoo! portal but with prominent newspaper content and branding. In other words: news, entertainment and events, restaurants, local service businesses, classifieds, etc.

In essence this would be a realization of the “local portal” strategy for newspapers that they can’t seem to formulate or execute on their own. The precise relationship of these local newspaper portal sites and the owned and operated newspaper sites would have to be worked out but a model exists in the old KnightRidder Digital “City.com” sites.

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Related: YP.com and LiveDeal are starting to roll out their combined assets.

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