Andy Serwer, the former Fortune editor who was named editor in chief of Yahoo Finance on Wednesday, writes about why he’s joining the financial news website.
Serwer writes:
In a way, joining Yahoo is a return to my digital-first roots. I started going to Yahoo Finance for market news and data years ago while writing my daily blog, ‘Streetlife,’ which launched in September 1997 at Fortune.com. This was early days and I was on Yahoo Finance so much that I must have caught the eye of the analytics people at the site. I know that because one day a couple Yahoos visited me at my office at Fortune to conduct what they called ‘a one person, heavy-user’ focus group. (They took notes.) So I’d like to think that I’ve already contributed in a small way to the betterment of Yahoo Finance. Now I hope to do a great deal more.
That’s because for all of Yahoo Finance’s scale and success, I see a tremendous opportunity to elevate it further. I look forward to exploring all the possibilities that the digital realm has to offer and to pushing out to other forms such as live events. The elevation process also entails expanding the creation of original premium content. This means bringing in distinguished reporters and journalists to break news and do groundbreaking and award-winning stories both in text and video and on mobile. It will be hard work—creating the best content always is—but it’s a fight that I know and relish. Beyond that, creating great work should be fun and rewarding to all parties, in myriad ways. It is to a significant degree why we live.
I’ve witnessed, participated in and I hope helped drive (to at least some degree) a tremendous amount of change in journalism over these recent years. It would be a mistake to say the only change has been in distribution. Yes of course that’s mostly the case, but the content itself has evolved and continues to evolve. (It’s always been thus. Try reading a newspaper article from 100 years ago.) Sure, the change in content has been driven in part by the new platforms, which makes things easier.
Read more here.
