Media News Group, the fourth largest newspaper publisher with titles such as The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News, has teamed up with TauMed to launch a video-centric health vertical. The vertical launches this month at four of MNG’s smaller papers. It will eventually be incorporated across the chain. Other local media partners are also being lined up.
TauMed, which is privately funded and has 12 employees, is the brainchild of Tauseef Bashir, a former executive with FAST Search and Transfer, the search company recently acquired by Microsoft. FAST’s influence is readily apparent in the service’s intent to make every action searchable. (Media News Group is also a FAST client). “All the information is search driven,” says Bashir.
As with other health portals in the marketplace, the service isn’t focused on local information other than directory content featuring doctor and hospital search. More local content will come in a second phase, says Bashir. The local effort will be aided by the promotional, sales and editorial capabilities of the local syndication partners. Ratings and reviews are probably the core of the local experience, he notes. The site will also be mobile enabled.
Miami Herald is a McClatchy paper…
In my experience, this type of content doesn’t draw much traffic for newspaper sites. As Bashir says, it’s a search driven space, and we all know where most health-related searches are being done. The layout is pretty cluttered and critical mass required for it to become a true community is difficult to gain.
Other than that, it’s great! ;)
Hi Mike, Thank you for the comment. By search driven we do not mean a search box. We mean that the personalization is powered using search algorithms. We power all widgets and personalization using search algorithms. This approach allows users to be connected with related information from all of the sources and content types regarding of what they are viewing on the site.
My point was that few consumers are going to visit the white-labeled pages since a) they don’t think of a newspaper as a source for general health information, so regular site users will not provide any significant traffic b) it’s tough to imagine that this content will rank very highly on search engines.
Perhaps with the buildout of more local content, progress could be made on both of these challenges. However, I think in order to built up any search engine ranking, you’ll have to change the domain structure of the sites from being subdomains of the taumed.com domain to being subdomains of each newspaper property’s site (e.g. http://health.connpost.com). This will take advantage of the local authority of those site domains, and also potentially mitigate duplicate content issues (current connpost site doesn’t appear to be indexing very well; it may be early yet, but do a search for “site:connpost.taumed.com” on Google…)