Is the Worst Over for Yahoo?

(MoneyWatch)  Yahoo reported a $303 million loss, or about 22 cents per share, for Q-4 in an earnings report filed after the market's close today, but that was slightly better than analysts expected, sending the company's stock up sharply (over 4 percent) in after-hours trading.

This was the first earnings call for new CEO Carol Bartz, and besides the usual blather at such events she made this notable statement: "I did not come to Yahoo to sell the company." This contradicts recent news reports that Yahoo has been recently engaged in talks with AOL and Microsoft, presumably about selling part or all of the company.
The company's 8-K report indicates that Yahoo's loss was due to the costs of its massive layoffs -- 1,500 -- and the writedown of some bad investments. If not for these events (and that's a big if), the company actually would have turned a profit of around 17 cents a share.

As a regular user of Yahoo News, I've noticed a bit of decline in the performance of the main news headline module on Yahoo's non-personalized home page -- the most visited page on the Internet. The news stories displayed there have for years been as reliably current as any online news site, in my experience, but recently certain stories seem to re-circulate in the module for days after they first got there.

Some of this may be purposeful, news cycles being somewhat repetitive and all, but it seems likely that the main problem here has been the loss of staff. The algorithms used by all aggregators, including Yahoo, have improved significantly from the past, but alas, when it comes to news judgment, human editors remain indispensable.

Yahoo has been a leader in recognizing this fact over the years; we'll be watching closely to see whether the new regime continues to commit sufficient human resources to News to prevent a further decline in its quality going forward.