The experience provided a model for what a collaborative approach to a networked news environment might look like—key ingredients being a major portal as a traffic hub, social media like Twitter for audience input and member participation to create the network effect.

The combination was very successful from all perspectives. Yahoo's news traffic jumped 20 percent compared to the norm for AP stories. Participating newspapers more than doubled their Web traffic from Yahoo. Twitter drove 27 percent more traffic to Yahoo than normal, and AP's blog attracted triple the traffic of the regular news story. Not incidentally, we estimate the net potential new revenue generated by the effort to be at least $200,000 greater than expenses.