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11/25/13 | Uncategorized

Katie Couric to Join Yahoo!

We’re cheering for Yahoo! as it welcomes an accomplished female media mogul to the company.

By Jessica Schimm (Assistant Editor, Women 2.0)

The newest woman to join Yahoo! is none other than award-winning journalist and well-known talk show host Katie Couric, who will be working with the tech company’s news program starting next year.

Couric will help to shape and build Yahoo!’s news services. Keeping up with the news is a daily habit of the Yahoo! audience, according to CEO Marissa Mayer, and this is a way to tap into their audience’s interests to help bolster revenue. Yahoo! news reports:

“Joining Yahoo offers a tremendous opportunity to reach people all around the world in the way that they’re using and consuming media today,” Couric said in a statement.

Couric’s hiring is the latest coup for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer as she brings in more prominent journalists in an effort to create compelling content that will attract more people to the company’s online services. In the past month, Yahoo has also lured away technology columnist David Pogue and political reporter Matt Bai from The New York Times.

Since leaving Google Inc. to become Yahoo’s CEO 16 months ago, Mayer has been trying to make Yahoo’s services more alluring so people will visit them on a regular basis and dwell for longer periods. In doing so, she is hoping Yahoo will be able to sell more digital ads and boost the Sunnyvale, Calif., company’s lackluster revenue growth.

Because advertising is Yahoo!’s core revenue source, the tech company is looking to focus on its content. According to USA Today:

…it’s becoming clear that content, with a heavy emphasis on video, will be a key element in Mayer’s efforts to buttress the fortunes of the Silicon Valley giant she runs.

Couric will take the title of Global News Anchor at Yahoo!  It is still undecided what will become of her talk show “Katie,” after May when the contract ends.

Before Couric started her own talk show, she was a co-host of the Today Show on NBC. She also has previous experience doing online news as the first female solo anchor of an evening news broadcast on CBS News where she hosted “a weekly online interview series and anchored several webcasts during the 2008 political season,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Photo via ellasportfolio / Flickr.

Do you think Yahoo! will attract more viewers with Couric’s help?

Jess headshotJessica Schimm (@JessicaSchimm) is the assistant editor at Women 2.0. She is a recent graduate of San Francisco State where she earned a B.A. in journalism and was the editor-in-chief of SF State’s Her Campus chapter. She has a strong interest in women’s issues and writes about them on her blog.

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