For years, Yahoo News has occupied a peculiar position in the media ecosystem. It is not a social network, not a traditional publisher, and not a search engine in the modern sense. Yet millions of people still use it as a daily starting point to understand what is happening in the world.
That role is under pressure.
News consumption has become increasingly fragmented, shaped by algorithmic feeds, short-form video, and now AI-generated summaries. Trust in media remains low, while generative AI is beginning to influence not just how information is ranked, but how it is interpreted before a user ever clicks through.
In a recent conversation on The Media Copilot, Yahoo News General Manager Kat Downs Mulder described how the company is adapting to that reality and what operating at scale has taught it about audience behavior, AI, and the future of aggregation.
Mulder joined Yahoo in 2022 after more than a decade at The Washington Post, where she worked across reporting, product, and audience development. That background, she said, shapes how she thinks about the current moment: less as a clean break from the past than as another disruptive phase in a long cycle of technological change.
At Yahoo, AI is being treated primarily as infrastructure. Large language models help the company understand, organize, and cluster large volumes of content from across publishers and creators. Those systems power features like topic groupings, summaries, and personalized digests, but Mulder emphasized that human editors remain closely involved in overseeing quality and accuracy.
That human-in-the-loop approach is deliberate. In an environment where misinformation is already widespread, Mulder argued that experimentation has limits, especially when facts are involved. Yahoo’s focus has been on deploying AI in ways that reduce cognitive overload rather than introduce new risks.
What we cover in this episode
• Why Yahoo still matters as a major gateway to news
• How AI is reshaping content aggregation and personalization
• Why audio is becoming a powerful habit-building news format
• What Yahoo learned from integrating Artifact into its app
• How AI summaries drive deeper engagement rather than replace it
• Balancing speed, scale, and trust in AI-driven news products
• How publishers and creators coexist inside Yahoo’s ecosystem
• Why user behavior matters more than age or demographics
• What an agent-driven web means for the future of news discovery
👤 Guest
Kat Downs Mulder
General Manager, Yahoo News
🔗 Speaker Bio (Digital Content Next Summit)
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Produced by Pete Pachal and Executive Producer Michele Musso
Edited by the Musso Media Team
Music: “Favorite” by Alexander Nakarada, licensed under CC BY 4.0
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