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Yahoo News Blog to Rely on Queries

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KCBS)- For about as long as anyone can remember, the news has been presented from a top-down kind of model. Editors determine which stories are important and share them with the audience.

But Yahoo is taking that model and turning it on its head.

Yahoo's new news blog will rely on search queries to help guide its reporting and writing on national affairs, politics and the media. We've already seen some of this from boxes at the side of our computer screen that says something like, "if you read this, you may want to read this too."

Ken Doctor is a media analyst and author of Newsonomics- Twelve New Trends that Will Shape the News. He says there's already been massive Internet success with companies that create content based on what people ask for, but those companies have catered more to answering frequently asked questions with "how to reports".

"The change here is an actual push down the line to actually changing what gets created, not what just gets pointed to because they can point to everything by being a search company," said Doctor.

Creating content is new for Yahoo, but the real irony may lie in the notion that they're becoming an old-fashioned publisher, but in a new-fangled way.

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