News Trends Tilt Toward Niche Sites

It was a rough week for the big guys on the Web.

Yahoo unceremoniously dumped its chief executive, Carol Bartz, and AOL faced a mutiny from TechCrunch, the Silicon Valley news site it bought last year. Apart from the specific business issues feeding those travails — sinking traffic and profits at both — they provided yet another lesson of the Internet age: as news surges on the Web, giant ocean liners like AOL and Yahoo are being outmaneuvered by the speedboats zipping around them, relatively small sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information. AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch last year for a reported $30 million was an acknowledgement that scale, once the grail of the Web, can be a disadvantage when it comes to attracting the kind of audiences advertisers want. Last year, Yahoo hired writers who had a made a name for themselves at smaller sites — including Mark Lisanti, Courtney Reimer and Will Leitch — for the same reasons. But it is difficult to successfully transplant insurgent energy into a vast conglomerate, because the big blog tends to consume or destroy whatever it is fed.