Update: Yahoo is looking to hire local editors in San Jose, Chicago and Dallas — in addition to San Francisco and New York, reports PaidContent.
Even MORE competition in local news? It looks like it. Fresh off its acquisition of Associated Content, Yahoo is reaching out to find “writers living in or near the San Francisco area to write compelling, local content,” reports Alan Mutter of Newsosaur. In email to Associated Content’s registered users, Yahoo is looking for writers to cover “highlights of your favorite neighborhood destinations to metro-wide, first-person reporting assignments covering the stories and topics not typically found in mainstream news media,” Mutter reports.
How Yahoo plans to integrate this local content is unclear. Yahoo has sales partnerships with over 800 newspapers and a few TV stations as part of its Newspaper Consortium, which is a unique dynamic to contend with as it expands it own local content efforts.
And San Francisco is especially competitive for local news, with all the traditional players as well as lots of great neighborhood blogs, a new cluster of Patch sites, and the new nonprofit Bay Citizen. And there’s that YouTube experiment with KGO. But it’s hard to dismiss Yahoo’s distribution power out of the gate. Stay tuned…
(Full disclosure: I work for msnbc.com, which is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC)