Yahoo Tests Its Media Credentials

If Alan Soon has his way, the word social will soon drop out of media conversations.

“I keep telling our social content editor, if he does his job right, he’ll be out of a job in about a year,” remarks Soon, managing editor of Yahoo in Southeast Asia.

“We want to make sure every one of our writers and editors and bloggers are writing stories that are meant to be shared, that are meant to incite conversations. I’m interested to see what online journalism looks like two years from now, when everyone thinks the same way.”

Media ambition
Already the world’s biggest publisher of digital content, primarily through licensing agreements with traditional broadcasters, newspapers and wire services, Yahoo also wants to be seen as a media company, building up editorial resources in local markets to carve out a distinctive voice of its own.

For Soon, who was a senior producer at CNBC before joining Yahoo, that means monitoring what Yahoo’s users think and incorporating these reactions into its reporting, differentiating itself from traditional news providers through its wide reach in Southeast Asia as well as how quickly stories can be updated by the team.

Yahoo already has the biggest audience for online news in many Southeast Asian markets, Soon says, putting the company in a good position to evolve its offering.

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“We have the reach, we have the right traffic and the eyeballs. What we need to do now is build a voice, and that brand of Yahoo as a media company and authority in its own right.”

Editorial headcount in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly since Soon was hired to build the team in May 2009, starting with five people in Singapore to 40 people working alongside freelancers and bloggers today, including sizable divisions in Indonesia and the Philippines and more recent operations in Malaysia and Vietnam.

Soon plans to add another 10 full-time staffers across the region this year.

Asian innovation
It’s easier to purpose-build an editorial division around social media dynamics in Southeast Asia than in places with more established editorial teams, such as North America or Western Europe, Soon points out.

As of today, this developing trend is perhaps more relevant to this region too, as internet users in Indonesia or the Philippines are more likely to discover news through social networks than users in somewhere like the UK, where search engines still play a more dominant role.

“We were building a team from scratch, so we were able to leapfrog a lot of the legacy team structures that we have at Yahoo,” Soon says.

“We built the team to focus on social, to focus on conversations. Markets like Indonesia are big on conversations, so this is a huge push for us that even the US team doesn’t see.”

This is an edited extract from a feature published in the Q1 2011 edition of The Asia Media Journal. The latest issue of The Asia Media Journal is available in full here.