Yahoo!
The company's most recent of its two newest projects appears to be the wrong battle. Yahoo! announced on Monday that it has hired eight new writers to create columns for its finance section on a biweekly or monthly basis. Yahoo! certainly chose wisely, since the list includes big guns such as economist and lawyer Ben Stein and David Bach, the author of The Automatic Millionaire.
But the Web is a crowded place, especially in the finance arena. Among others, you've got Forbes, McGraw-Hill's
However, the portal operator's other recent initiative should prove to be much more worthwhile. Yahoo!'s intriguing (but unfortunately named) Web program "Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone" features the journalist traveling to, filming, and reporting upon every armed conflict around the world. By fully leveraging the multimedia power of the Web, it promises to provide viewers with a perspective they can't find anywhere else.
Yahoo! is wise to experiment with original content, since it has the potential to attract more viewers and, consequently, more advertisers. But if Yahoo! hopes to cash in on its new creations, it needs to choose content that's as unique as it is compelling.
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Fool contributor Brian Gorman is a freelance writer in Chicago. He does not own shares of any companies mentioned in this article.