For years, the aggregator model was simple. Curate the best journalism from thousands of publishers and send audiences their way. Now that contract is being rewritten and Yahoo News is one of the most interesting places to watch it happen.
In this episode of Newsroom Robots, I spoke with Kat Downs Mulder, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Yahoo News, about how the platform is layering AI across every surface of a product that reaches over a 180 million people in the U.S. alone each month. Kat previously spent more than 14 years at The Washington Post as chief product officer and managing editor before taking on the challenge of modernizing one of the internet’s original news destinations.
Yahoo’s purchase of Artifact, the AI news app built by Instagram’s co-founders, gave the platform a new recommendation engine that prioritizes time spent reading over clicks. Its new AI answer engine, Yahoo Scout, synthesizes information with rich citations and visual context. Its AI-powered daily audio digest turns personalized news into a listening habit. Each of these products makes Yahoo more useful to its audience.
But each of them also changes the relationship between Yahoo and the publishers whose journalism powers the platform. When Scout can give you the answer you need without a click-through, when an audio digest summarizes a story so well you never open the article, when personalization makes Yahoo the destination instead of the pass-through, the old aggregator math stops working for publishers. I pushed on this in the conversation, and Kat was candid. The compensation models haven’t been figured out yet. Yahoo is working with the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace to develop new economics, but the industry is still writing those rules in real time.
She makes a strong case for how Yahoo is approaching this differently, from how Scout prominently surfaces publishers, to the rev-share model they operate, to why she believes the quality flywheel they are building actually rewards better journalism.
Kat believes original, distinctive journalism will become more valuable in an AI world because AI agents will seek out what is unique. The question is whether the economics will catch up to that belief before publishers run out of runway.
This conversation raises a bigger question about the future of the aggregator model: what it owes the journalism that powers it, and what comes next.
In this episode, we cover:
02:00 — Why Yahoo acquired Artifact and how it shifted recommendation algorithms
06:20 — The shift from click-based metrics to deeper engagement signals such as session time and retention
08:50 — Inside Yahoo Scout, Yahoo’s new AI answer engine built to support publishers and the open web
14:10 — The changing economics of news as AI platforms begin generating answers instead of sending traffic
17:40 — Yahoo’s personalized AI-generated audio news digest and why multimodal news experiences matter
22:00 — How Yahoo combines human editorial judgment with algorithmic personalization
31:00 — How AI is transforming newsroom product development and prototyping
36:10 — The tension between personalization and journalism’s civic responsibility
41:30 — What smaller newsrooms can learn from the AI product playbook’
🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Kat Downs Mulder on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform.
