Yahoo News now with a Human touch

A man who was mentioned to have “dramatically improved dallasnews.com” would now be the lead editor for Yahoo local news. Looks like Yahoo does believe that quality and creativity of the news that it provides its visitors is a crucial factor in traffic growth.

Well, it did not conclude this based on an analysis, but rather the new recruits previous accomplishments. Anthony Moor, deputy managing editor/interactive of the Dallas Morning News is whom we are talking about. It is said that after he took charge, the monthly unique visitor traffic had increased by 186% [wow] since July 2007. Yeah, Yahoo has done some serious background verification.

A memo was circulated to the staff by George Rodrique , Managing Editor of Morning News regarding the same. Here is what he wrote:

From: Rodrigue, George
Subject: Anthony Moor’s moving to Yahoo!’s local news team

Colleagues,

I’m sorry to say that Anthony Moor, our deputy managing editor for interactive news, is leaving us to take a job at Yahoo!.

In just over two years, Anthony has dramatically improved dallasnews.com. He played major roles in launching our community pages, rebuilding sportsday.com, integrating GuideLive.com into the new Zvents platform, building our beat-blogging system, bringing better commenting tools to our Web sites, and updating HSGT. He also pushed many under-the-hood improvements that were critically important to our success on the Web. For instance, he dramatically increased our outreach in social media, improved our search-engine optimization performance, and led various integration efforts with Yahoo! and The Associated Press.

Our monthly unique visitors are up 186 percent since Anthony’s arrival in July of 2007. That kind of improvement comes only from a rare combination of intellect and passion. Anthony brought both to the newsroom, every single day.

The good news for us is that Anthony’s new job, as lead editor of Yahoo!’s local-news effort, means we’ll likely be staying in touch with him.

Anthony will be with us through Thanksgiving, after which Linda Leavell will be in day-to-day charge of our Interactive team.

Please join me in thanking Anthony for all he has done for us, and congratulating him on his new opportunity.

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