[Staci D. Kramer] Neil Budde helped lay the foundation for the Wall Street Journal’s subscription site; for the past year, he’s been on the other coast as GM of one of the most-trafficked news sites, Yahoo News. We spoke after his keynote; subjects included integration across Yahoo, RSS, advertising and more.
You can download the audio here . (13 min., 6.4 megs.) Some excerpts below:

Advertising: “From an advertising standpoint, when you can start to target ... that user becomes more valuable than an undifferentiated mass of people you pick up in a newspaper you can’t target within. ... I think the area that’s growing and is most interesting, particularly in news, is behavioral ... being able to reach the people you want within this huge news audience who have recently visited Yahoo Autos or recently visited Yahoo Travel or have shown some other characteristic that they have an interest in some particular area that an advertiser can target.”

On RSS: “We’re never going to have a relationship or have the content for every publisher, every type of content you might want but to make it a destination where people choose to come and say, ‘This is where I start my news gathering experience,’ they can bring in—through RSS—news from other places. ... They’ll see some of the news that lives and exists at Yahoo News and they’ll see headlines that link them out and that makes Yahoo News a more comprehensive package.” He sees some possibilities for matching the interests users show with feeds to advertising but that it’s not something Yahoo is doing now.

On the differences—and similarities—between Yahoo News and WSJ.com: “... In both cases I believe my job is largely about taking the information assets you have and turning that into a product that was compelling and interesting and engaging to that target market. Now the difference—one side, you have proprietary content only living inside of the Wall Street Journal … and it was a different market. On the Yahoo side, a lot of the content … is widely licensed from a large number of other sites. My feeling is the job is actually harder in a way at Yahoo … because you had a leg up with the proprietary Wall Street Journal in reaching an audience …  On the other side, taking a lot of content that’s widely licensed and turning it in to a useful, valuable, compelling news experience takes a lot more work in a way.”

On integration within Yahoo: “News is probably by traffic one of the top five businesses within Yahoo and what I think is also interesting about it is it’s so widely integrated across Yahoo. It’s not necessarily that people are coming to Yahoo for news but a lot of people want Yahoo to be a prominent part of the experience.” For instance, news headlines were added to the Yahoo Mail page during the past year.

On original content: I don’t see a hard and fast percentage. ... It’s always going to be a small part of what we do. I think it has a couple of reasons for being. As I said earlier, a lot of the content that we aggregate is widely licensed so you always going have a challenge that anybody else could license that set of content and build a news site that might appeal to people so original content you’ll only find on Yahoo News. So original content on Yahoo News gives us a little slice so people will say I’m going to come to Yahoo News for that and I’ll take advantage of the whole rest of the site. In a way, other parts of Yahoo News benefit who start to identify with Kevin Sites in the hot zone or Dear Margo or whatever. ...” Budde says the columnists will be a mix of people like Margo Howard with an established audience and new voices. One option: working with content partners to provide additional presence for people better known in other media. “The more likely scenario is not that we’d try to move somebody away from one of our partners but we’d work with our partner to take somebody who may be part of their stable and take them to the next level.”