Yahoo! News Underground

» see underground.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Reuters got the first word of it on 22 February 2007, under the working title Odd News Underground, with Scott Moore of Yahoo News promising a singing anchor who would leave you tapping your feet. The thing that actually launched on 1 April carried a straighter name and the same premise. Cyrus Krohn posted the announcement on Yahoo's own blog at 11:56 that morning, there was no press outreach, comments were switched off, and the date was the date it was. Michael Arrington wrote it up at TechCrunch the same day and spent most of the piece arguing with himself about whether he was being had, before landing on the practical test: if this is a joke, it was an awful lot of work to throw away on 2 April.

It was not a joke. Brad Miskell created it, hosted it, shot it, cut it and scored it, which Yahoo described by calling him a rock-and-raconteur, and the result was a bi-weekly run of video, photography and written reportage across nine standing beats. Science fiction fandom. The import scene, meaning tuners and drifting. Gay rodeo, tribute bands, graffiti writers, krumping, art cars, amateur rocketry, and Bollywood dance troupe competitions. Each feature came with original songs Miskell had written and recorded about the people in it, which is not something news organizations do.

Readers could feed it. There was an official Flickr group for photo submissions and an upload path at underground.yahoo.com for video, and the group's rules said plainly that what you put in might end up on the site. The pool reached 48 members and 1,042 photos two weeks after launch and peaked at 108 members and 1,506 photos in January 2008, by which point the show it belonged to had been dead for six months.

The last feature published was Bollywood Berkeley, timestamped 26 July 2007 at 12:32 PM Eastern. Yahoo never announced a cancellation. No trade publication wrote one. The only death notice in existence is the one Miskell typed into the description field of the show's own Flickr group, which he also renamed to Underground's Days Are Numbered: okay, gang, Yahoo News Underground is toast, the powers that be at Yahoo felt it was too edgy for Yahoo's audience, and he would likely start publishing at American Subculture again after Labor Day.

~ the record ~

~ a long way from Ankara ~

I was 23 that year, finishing university, on TTNet broadband that had been in the house about a year. Online video had arrived for me the way it arrived for everyone here, which was YouTube and nothing else. Underground was built from material you have to be inside a country to find interesting: a rodeo circuit with its own politics, cars rebuilt as sculpture, hobbyists launching rockets into somebody's weekend desert. I could have watched every episode and still been a tourist in it. That is what a show about subcultures is, and these subcultures were two continents away.

~ too edgy, and too expensive ~

The internal verdict Miskell reported is only half the explanation. Three weeks after launch, MediaPost's Mark Walsh noted that Yahoo had repeatedly said it no longer planned to create costly original programming and preferred to work with content partners instead, and judged Underground too structured and too niche to travel the way web video needed to travel. So the show was announced into a strategy the company had already abandoned.

It also lost its cover. Lloyd Braun had been pushed out of Yahoo Media Group at the end of 2006. Cyrus Krohn, the Yahoo News director who signed Underground's launch post, left the company in July 2007 for the Republican National Committee's new-media operation, which is the same month the show stopped publishing. A one-person production with no executive sponsor left inside the building does not survive a budget review.

~ the sixteen months after ~

Yahoo stopped making episodes in July 2007 and then left the entire site online, untouched, for well over a year. The last capture serving real content is from 8 July 2008. The first capture that is not the site at all is 11 December 2008, and what it holds is a bare 301 with a server stamp reading Thu Dec 11 12:49:29 PST 2008, pointing at news.yahoo.com. That redirect is still in place today.

Miskell sent his contributors to americansubculture.com, which he had been running since June 2007 and which stopped posting on 24 July that year, a fortnight before Underground did. Both domains answer nothing now. The Wikipedia article for the show was written in August 2009 by an account that then edited it eight more times the same night under the name Thebradmiskell, and it cites no source for the cancellation at all, which means the only durable record of when this thing died is a crawler's timestamps and a comment box on Flickr.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »