What Yahoo's Katie Couric hire reveals about its content strategy

Ramin Talaie

Former Today Show anchor and day time talk show host Katie Couric will join Yahoo. But what does that mean for Yahoo's content strategy?

Jon Xavier: Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

We heard some rumblings last week, and now it's confirmed: Katie Couric is leaving ABC News for a new gig at Yahoo.
In a blog post announcing the appointment, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that as Global Anchor, Couric will be the "face of Yahoo News" and will shoot features for its homepage. She's not leaving TV entirely, either — Couric will continue to host her daytime talk show, "Katie," even though it looks like her day-to-day news role at ABC is over.
Couric is the highest profile of a string of high-profile hires at Yahoo as it pushes to turn its relatively strong Yahoo News brand into a major player in online media. Mayer has also brought in New York Times tech columnist David Pogue to lead a tech news vertical, former NYT deputy news editor Megan Lieberman to be its editor-in-chief, and NYT Magazine writer Matt Bai to be its national political correspondent.
Put simply, Yahoo under Mayer appears to be all-in on online media, particularly video, despite some early throat clearing. Ross Levinsohn, the man who was up for the top job before Mayer's surprise announcement, famously thought of Yahoo as primarily a media company with a lot of pointless tech products that it needed to shed, so Mayer was quick to de-emphasize that strategy initially.
At the time of her appointment, many were saying that the primary issue facing Yahoo's incoming chief was deciding whether it was going to be a tech company or a media company. Mayer was quick to dismiss that debate as "not the right question."
But what is Yahoo's media strategy? That's not really clear. To the extent that it has one, it seems to be to throw as much money as possible at the problem, pick up really high-profile names, and trust that traffic will sort itself out. You can see that in the slightly schizophrenic way Mayer describes the things she admires about Couric in her announcement: