Occam's Razor

I have nothing against females as CEOs. It’s clear that females make up a tiny minority of corporate CEOs and members of corporate boards. Recent news reports suggest that progress on this front has stalled. But there are a few of them. Few have been more prominent in the news lately than Marissa Mayer, the relatively new 38-year-old CEO of Yahoo. She has been making a splash for herself, not just for leaving a job at Google to take on the troubled Yahoo, but also for her many changes to the relatively staid and unprofitable Yahoo, Inc., something of a great grandfather on the World Wide Web.  These included bringing a nursery into the office for her now year old son and requiring her employees to actually come into the office instead of telecommute.

Mayer though has a track record of success with Google and she’s proving adept so far at changing the dynamics at Yahoo. Her old employer Google must really miss her because she successfully led a number of divisions at Google, including some of its principle products: its search engine and GMail. Yahoo had been losing revenue and market share, but things are quickly turning around with Mayer in charge. Yahoo now gets more web traffic than Google again, no small feat and while not quite profitable again, it is making strides toward profitability. She has purchased the blogging site Tumblr and Yahoo’s stock price is rebounding. It has more than doubled during her brief tenure as CEO.

So she is doing good for stockholders and with her reputation she can probably turn around Yahoo, which is good because a World Wide Web mostly overseen by the benevolent Google overlord is not a healthy dynamic. She is getting more eyeballs and more interest from advertisers. Yahoo stockholders should be happy with her performance to date, and hope that they can keep her around.

I was a Yahoo fan from early on. At one time it was the only destination worth going to on the web. It was my home page for many years. It attempted to index the Internet, and actual humans were categorizing content. I’m old enough to remember what Yahoo really stands for (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle). It was the first web site to do a really good job, in a 1995 kind of way, of helping us find stuff on this new medium called the Internet. For many years I had a Yahoo email account. But Yahoo proved not very agile as it aged, and various ineffective CEOs tended to make things worse.

I don’t go to Yahoo more often than I used to and use Google and its services even more than I used to, although I often feel guilty about it. But I do keep Yahoo News as my principle news page, or did until recently. It was a habit hard to break. The page was edited by actual human beings, rather than Google News, which is edited by a human-programmed computer algorithm. Considering Mayer also ran Google News, I expected Yahoo News might look a lot more like Google News. It is taking on some of its characteristics, including more personalization options. It is also, I am sorry to say, loading up the news site with a lot of fluff. This is making me very unhappy.

Stockholders are probably applauding this move to add these “human interest” stories. If you go to Yahoo News, you can’t possibly miss them, as they comprise about one of every three stories on its main page. It’s not quite National Enquirer stuff, but it’s a lot of Good Morning America-like stuff. In fact, Good Morning America (ABC) is one of their featured content providers. What do I mean by fluff? Well, there was the recent live broadcast of The Sound of Music on TV, and Yahoo News was all over it (it was mostly dissed by the critics). Is this really news? It probably gets a lot of clicks so it surely must be interesting to a lot of people. But no, this is not really news, except possibly in the category of entertainment news. It would be fodder for Variety’s web site. It’s not news in my book.

Perhaps it is just me. News to me is a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times. I expect to learn, not just what is happening right now that could affect my locality, my country, the world and me. I expect some in-depth reporting on an issue so I can understand the dynamics of the many pressing issues of the day. In short, I read news not to be entertained, but to gain knowledge. I need lots of facts and I need unbiased, in-depth understanding of these facts by reporters who sift through these issues and talk with leading authorities. I seek knowledge because to change the world I must understand not just how it behaves but why it behaves the way it does. News should have its pulse on the planet and should tell citizens like me who are reasonably informed more of what we need to know to stay informed.

I’m not getting much of this on Yahoo News anymore, and I hold Marissa Mayer to blame. I get lots of popcorn articles like this Sound of Music piffle, which today includes an ancillary story about the von Trapp’s mountain lodge in Stowe, Vermont. I get Dear Abby, now available only online at Yahoo but linked daily through its “news” page. I get stories about the lottery. And when I do deign to read an article that looks like real news, it is often short when I want depth. Worse, I get articles that aren’t articles at all, but you don’t know that until you click on it. Instead, it’s video that starts loading even if you don’t want it to load, and for which you have to “pay the freight” of an annoying commercial first. Expect more of the same because one of Marissa Mayer’s recent ideas is to hire Katie Couric as its “global anchor”. I expect lots of little fluff pieces like this and “lite-news” interwoven into its news site during the course of the day. It’s all part of the Yahoo experience, or something that Mayer is planning.

It may be successful for Yahoo and Mayer, but it’s not what I’m looking for in a news site because most of this is not really news. It’s marketing designed to attract eyeballs, perhaps making it a somewhat toned down version of Huffington Post, another site designed by a female overlord full of sauce but little relevant news.

I don’t like where this is leading. It will probably lead to profitability for Yahoo, but as far as leaving us citizens better informed, it’s a poor effort at best. There are plenty of other news sites out there including CNN and all the major networks, but most of these are becoming less newsworthy and saucier as well. Which leaves me looking for a real news site. There is the reliable and local washingtonpost.com site, but I get most of that content from my newspaper subscription. Ironically, I find myself getting most of my news from one of Mayer’s old projects: Google News. For the most part, unless you choose to delve into an area like Entertainment, its news is topical, relevant and in-depth articles tend to get priority. I find I like the algorithmic approach better than Mayer’s approach on Yahoo. I’m just hoping Google doesn’t try to sauce up its news algorithms.

Marissa, consider that public service may be part of Yahoo’s mission as well as enriching shareholders. How about a version of Yahoo News that is just news, instead of so much fluff, like maybe real.news.yahoo.com? And while I am making suggestions, please get rid of the cutesy Yahoo News animated image in the top left corner of the site. And surely you have noticed that since your top menu bar is stuck on the top and you can’t avoid it, when you page down it hides some content, which means you have to cursor up or drag the window up a bit to read it. And you often have the same article, or a variation of it, on the same page. Can’t these be cleaned up?

It seems moot to me. I like your old product better, so I’m hanging out now on Google News.