There was a pretty good long-form piece about Yahoo News in The Baffler a while back [1]. It was by Chris Lehmann, a former YN editor. Although one expects that there's going to be a certain amount of one-sidedness in an account by an employee that was let go, it makes a pretty compelling case that one of Yahoo's flagship properties was disastrously mismanaged. He's highly critical of Mayer: "When editorial knowledge is deployed to elevate advertising, it stops being either editorial, or knowledge; it’s hackery, sold out to the highest, or just the bare middling bidder. [...] Under Mayer’s leadership, the company has brought this ugly art form to sophisticated new heights — and in the process blown through all the basic rudiments of journalistic ethics." There's definitely some corroboration for that view point, BTW. [2]

And it wasn't just the way the firewall between editorial and advertising was dismantled by Mayer. He documents the atrocious working conditions, the extent to which the executives Mayer hired to manage YN had no idea what they were doing, YN's reliance on gimmicks to try to juice page views (which didn't even work), and the way the site's editorial mission seemed to shift from week to week. Lehmann tells a particularly hilarious story about a Yahoo exec trying to pitch a Crossfire-type blog where a rightwing blowhard and a leftwing blowhard would argue with each other. The exec really wants to hire Robert Novak, not realizing the guy had died two years ago.

Anyway, after reading this and then reading the OP...not surprising.

[1] http://thebaffler.com/salvos/purple-reign [2] http://deadspin.com/dan-gilbert-didnt-like-a-yahoo-blog-post...