News aggregators like Yahoo!, MSN and AOL have supplanted network television as “power hubs for news,” Rachel Rosemarin reports in Forbes. Two out of every five people who use Yahoo! look at its news, finance and sports sites–50 million people every month, according to Internet tracking firm ComScore.
Broadcast television still reaches more people in a single hour; 6 million viewers at a time will tune in to the CBS Evening News. But over the course of a month, the online portals are providing news to more people.
The upside for consumers is the ability to get the news they want from lots of different sources. But you won’t find many job openings for journalists at the portals. “Our news product is very leanly staffed,” says Yahoo!’s Scott Moore. “The MSNBC news room has 150 to 200 people. Yahoo! News is a fraction of that.”
