I was hopeful when Mayer took over Yahoo that she could turn the company around. However, with each passing day and the Yahoo home page continues to feature irritating ads with zooming cars and flying coke cans, my hopes are starting to fade.

Putting marketing in charge of journalism is probably a bad move but worse is the poaching of mainstream, old-school talent from the NYT or NBC. If we have learned nothing from the internet it is that interesting, intelligent commentary and opinion does not necessarily originate with the NYT. The trick is to find the untapped talent out there, the writers with a fresh view and who are not committed to the old ways and give them a voice, assuming you want to make Yahoo into a media giant on par with the NYT. But it starts with new voices not repackaged old voices who had a lock on the channels of communication for decades for historical and accidental reasons not merit.