AOL Leaps Into Original News Content With PoliticsDaily.com

“As the site becomes more of a brand and more successful, you may see us begin to move more into [breaking] news coverage, but we don’t see that as the wise place to start.”

Hennerger said the site will aim for good writing. "People have thought there's one way to do it on the web and that’s to dominate the ten-second news cycle. We are gambling there's another audience that wants you to step back, for maybe a day, and do thoughtful analysis pieces that are heavily reported."

At Yahoo, the company’s recent strategy has been to identify an audience need, then fill it, with shows like “Prime Time in No Time,” a humorous daily round-up of prime-time shows that averages 400,000 daily streams, and the upcoming celebrity mom show “Spotlight to Nightlight.”

That approach could be translated into more traditional news content, as well -- perhaps erasing memories of the last push Yahoo made into becoming a major entertainment news content creator several years ago, which was eventually scaled back. 

Over at Google, the cultural barriers to becoming a producer of news, rather than just a technology company that works with news outlets to distribute news, are steeper.  For years the company has held dear the dogma that it does not produce media content.

“We are a technology company, not a media company,” said Google spokesperson Jennie Johnston. “The tremendous amount of expertise that goes into news gathering, editors, journalists – it’s not something we have to be good at.’’ 

The focus across Google is instead on working with news organizations: “We want to help newspapers distribute their content online, engage their readers better.” Google’s ethos is to “create – but not be creative,” as Johnston put it. It’s an appealing model, and you can’t argue much with the results.

Still, the lure of the potentially lucrative gap opening up as traditional news organizations radically downsize could be hard to resist.  And the chance for someone like Schmidt to be a white knight -- in this case, to appear to “save” journalism – might prove irresistible. When Schmidt floated the idea of buying the New York Times a year ago, there was an almost universal outpouring of joy at the prospect.

There are doubters, of course. Given the culture clash between technology people and news people, “Google is not going to successfully build a news organization,” said Michael Wolff, whose own news site, newser.com had 1.7 million unique visitors last month. “But can they profitably buy something, that’s a different question. If Google were to give any news organization its traffic, that’s the way to create a category killer.” (See accompanying Q&A with Michael Wolff.)

In the meantime, the “news ecosystem” that’s emerging in the digital era will consist of much more than simply content created by huge companies. News now means professionals and amateurs, newspapers and nonprofits, Twitter, blogs and Flickr streams, with aggregators and RSS feeds and tools like Google Reader to sort it all out. 

(At the South by Southwest festival this weekend, complementary pieces on the teeming digital news landscape by new media seers Clay Shirky and Steven Johnson were much discussed and Twittered-about among the media set.

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