Despite the general bearishness about Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), there are some bright spots in its portfolio, if you believe the stories:
—Yahoo News: An interview with Scott Moore, VP of news and information (also a speaker at our FOBM conference), on the news group’s philosophy, and its slightly changed selection of news sources, after some original content forays two years ago didn’t go as well. The content licensing frenzy has subsided over the last year, after signing on providers like 60 Minutes, CBS (NYSE: CBS) Local News, ABC News, CNN, Reuters (NSDQ: RTRSY), the BBC, and others. The company is now aggregating more and sending users to originating websites. Also, Yahoo is working on more user-generated social news..the company is also planning a lifestyle mini-portal that pulls together content from his health, kids, tech and food properties.

—Yahoo Sports: Yahoo Sports knocked off ESPN in August to become the most-visited online sports destination, thanks in part to its acquisition of college sports network Rivals.com, according to Nielsen//NetRatings, reported by THR. Yahoo edged ESPN by about 200K unique visitors in August, finishing the month with 18.4 million visitors, the numbers said. Yahoo continued to be the leader in September, as far as weekly metrics, with nearly 12 million visitors for the week ending Sept. 23, about 3 million more than ESPN.

—Yahoo Music: The division has gone thorough its share of pain, due to internal and external reasons, and now the head of Yahoo Music says he has had enough. In a presentation at a digital music conference last week, Ian C Rogers had this to say: “If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.”