YAHOO’S BRAIN DRAIN SHOWS A LOSS OF FAITH INSIDE THE COMPANY

Original Story: nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — Marissa Mayer, the glamorous, geeky Google executive hired to turn around Yahoo in 2012, used to inspire hope in Yahoo’s work force just by visiting the cafeteria for ice cream and mingling.

Now, morale has sunk so low that some employees refer to Ms. Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, as “Evita” — an allusion to Eva Peron, the former first lady of Argentina whose outsize ego and climb to power and wealth were chronicled in the musical of that name.

Ms. Mayer is about to make herself even less popular with Yahoo’s nearly 11,000 employees. Faced with the failure of her efforts to reignite growth at the 22-year-old Silicon Valley company, she is now turning to the opposite strategy: cutting. As some investors press Yahoo to fire her, Ms. Mayer is crafting a last-ditch plan to streamline the company — including significant layoffs — that is expected to be announced before month’s end. A Memphis employee rights lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

While many Yahoo workers are keeping their heads down, just doing their jobs, others have lost faith in Ms. Mayer’s leadership, according to conversations with more than 15 current and former employees from all levels of the company, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of continuing ties to Yahoo and its strict policy against leaks.

More than a third of the company’s work force has left in the last year, say people familiar with the data. Worried about the brain drain, Ms. Mayer has been approving hefty retention packages — in some cases, millions of dollars — to persuade people to reject job offers from other companies. But those bonuses have had the side effect of creating resentment among other Yahoo employees who have stayed loyal and not sought jobs elsewhere.

Only 34 percent of employees believe that Yahoo’s prospects are improving, according to surveys conducted by Glassdoor, a firm that collects data on jobs and employers. That compares with 61 percent who are optimistic at Twitter, another troubled tech company, and 77 percent who see a bright future at Google, Ms. Mayer’s former employer. A Boston employment lawyer is following this story closely.

“Basically, it shows employees losing faith in Marissa Mayer and Yahoo,” said Scott Dobroski, a spokesman for Glassdoor who analyzed the data.

Yahoo declined to comment on employee morale but said that turnover is normal at Silicon Valley companies. While thousands of people have left, many others have been hired, offsetting some of the losses. “We’re still hiring, and our application numbers are strong,” Yahoo said in a statement.

One Yahoo employee who was interviewed said she was praying to be laid off so she could collect a severance payment and move on with her life. Others said they were actively looking for their next jobs — a task made more difficult because of the taint of failure that potential employers sometimes associate with anyone at the struggling company.

“Brands are important out here for employers,” said Nick Parham, a career coach in San Francisco who has had several Yahoo clients. “They are going to look harder at people from Facebook and Salesforce, companies that have winning strategies.”

Employees’ faith in Ms. Mayer began crumbling in earnest in August 2014, when Yahoo embarked on a series of stealth layoffs, current and former insiders said. For months, managers called in a handful of employees each week and fired them. No one knew who would be next, and the constant fear paralyzed the company, according to people who watched the process. A Memphis wrongful termination lawyer is following this story closely.

Last March, Ms. Mayer told the staff at an all-hands meeting that the bloodletting was finally over. Shortly thereafter, she changed her mind and demanded more cuts. All told, about 1,100 people lost their jobs in the layoffs.

Contributing to the employees’ disenchantment were Ms. Mayer’s protracted deliberations over a corporate reorganization last year that led to the departure of several key lieutenants and broke up the much-ballyhooed mobile team, prompting many mobile engineers to seek other jobs.

Hanging over everything has been the uncertainty about the company’s plan to spin off its $26 billion stake in Alibaba, which was announced a year ago but was abandoned last month by the company’s board of directors because of tax concerns. A Los Angeles finance lawyer represents clients in asset sales, debt and equity finance claims, and in financial restructuring cases.

For all of Yahoo’s problems, many of its employees still have a deep affection for the company, whose products were the gateway to the Internet for a generation of web users and still remain popular, with more than 1 billion monthly visitors.

“We all want to make as much impact as we can and leverage Yahoo’s existing strengths,” said Austin Shoemaker, who now manages Yahoo’s instant-messaging efforts after his start-up, Cooliris, was acquired by Yahoo in 2014.

The company has long struggled to overcome two big challenges: the industrywide drop in display advertising that has traditionally been its primary revenue source and the distraction inherent in trying to excel at many different things, from news and fantasy sports to web searches and email.

Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, said that Ms. Mayer had always told people that it would take three to five years for the company’s turnaround efforts to show results.

“It would be nice to give Yahoo one thing to magically save the company overnight,” Mr. Bonforte said in an interview last month, adding that the idea was unrealistic. Ms. Mayer has invested in technology, he said, “to give Yahoo a chance to be incredibly integral to this next phase of where the Internet is going.”

Mr. Bonforte’s team, for example, has spent much of the last two years rebuilding Yahoo’s email and instant-messaging services from the ground up, focusing on features such as better searches in email and the ability to unsend or delete an instant message at any time. While those reworked products garnered a modest reception from users, he said the technology was now in place for faster innovation. Organic Search Marketing brings exposure to your website and leads to increased page views per website visitor, more time spent on your site by users, and higher conversion rates especially with phone calls and email inquiries.

He said that Ms. Mayer was the best boss he had ever had, but acknowledged some truth in the common criticism that she was tightfisted with praise and sometimes displayed a harshness that could be demoralizing.

“Marissa is the type of boss that makes you feel like you’re disappointing her at all times, so I always feel like I’m on the verge of being fired,” said Mr. Bonforte, who is widely respected for both his talent and his irreverence. “It’s never, ‘Way to go, Jeff!’ ”

Mr. Bonforte said he was proud of Yahoo and his team and had no plans to leave. But other top executives have recently departed for other opportunities, including Kathy Savitt, the architect of the video strategy that Ms. Mayer has now dropped, and Jackie Reses, who led the company’s acquisitions and managed its relationship with Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company in which Yahoo holds a 15 percent stake.

The latest loss was Prashant Fuloria, whose company, Flurry, was sold to Yahoo in 2014. Ms. Mayer put him in charge of Yahoo’s critical advertising technology last January, but he quit in December to work on start-up ideas. A Memphis employment lawyer is following this story closely.

Ms. Mayer has put on a brave face despite all the turmoil.

At Yahoo’s annual holiday party, a Roaring Twenties-themed affair held Dec. 4 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, she sat in a chair — visibly pregnant with twin daughters who were born the next week — and posed for photos with employees. “She was kind of like Santa Claus,” said one fan who waited in line for a picture.

Just before the party, Ms. Mayer and the company’s other directors decided to stop pursuing the original Alibaba spinoff plan and instead slim down and spin off Yahoo’s core business.

Now, everyone is waiting for details of that plan, which Ms. Mayer has promised to outline by the time the company reports its fourth-quarter financial results this month.

That is unlikely to soothe the unrest at Yahoo, however, since activist investors like the Starboard Value hedge fund are pushing for new management, a new board and a new strategy, including a possible sale of Yahoo’s operating businesses.  A Cincinnati IT services company provides wireless network design, planning, implementation, IT system management, and networking equipment.

Mr. Bonforte said those outside forces were beyond his control.

“That’s the problem with a turnaround,” he said. “The world gets to decide, ‘Time’s up.’ ”

MARISSA MAYER GIVES BIRTH TO TWIN GIRLS

Original Story: money.cnn.com

On Wednesday, Marissa Mayer announced a new plan for the future of Yahoo. On Thursday, she gave gave birth to identical twin girls.

The Yahoo CEO tweeted that she, the twins and her husband, Zachary Bogue, are "doing great."
On her Tumblr blog, Mayer said the twins were born early Thursday morning. A Phoenix corporate lawyer provides professional legal counsel and extensive experience in many aspects of corporate law.

"Thanks to everyone for all of the support and well wishes throughout my pregnancy," she posted.
She did not yet reveal the twins' names.

Zack and I are excited to announce that our identical twin girls were born early this morning. Our whole family is doing great! @zackbogue
— marissamayer (@marissamayer) December 10, 2015

A Yahoo spokeswoman said in a statement the Mayer-Bogue family is "beyond thrilled."
"We couldn't be happier for them!" she said.

Mayer and Bogue also have a son, Macallister, who is 3 years old. Mayer revealed that she was pregnant with Macallister on the day she accepted the Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) job in July 2012.

The Yahoo CEO was criticized by maternity leave advocates for returning to work quickly after giving birth to her son. Mayer had a nursery installed close to her desk so she could work and help to take care of her child without going back and forth from her office. A Memphis employment lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

When Mayer announced in August that she was expecting twins, she said she planned on taking a similar tactic.

"Since my pregnancy has been healthy and uncomplicated and since this is a unique time in Yahoo's transformation, I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago, taking limited time away and working throughout," Mayer said in a Tumblr post.

Mayer stuck to that promise, appearing on a conference call with investors and on CNBC Wednesday morning to discuss Yahoo's plans to keep the company's lucrative Alibaba stake and spin off its core Internet business into a new company. An Ann Arbor IT services company provides networking solutions that help your business meet the growing demands of today's global marketplace.

CNBC anchor David Faber offered Mayer well-wishes, which she thanked him for. She said during the interview that she was expecting the twins to arrive "later this month."

"There's always a lot to do on both the homefront and the workfront," Mayer said.

Mayer's twins were born just two weeks after Facebook (FB, Tech30) CEO Mark Zuckerberg's wife Priscilla Chan gave birth to the couple's first child -- a daughter named Maxima.

OPINION: MARISSA MAYER MOVES CLOSER TO YAHOO ENDGAME

Original Story: marketwatch.com

A story in Re/code not only makes it appear that Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer’s effort to turn around Yahoo has failed, but also that she doesn’t know how to manage people.

According to this article by Kara Swisher, published Monday, Yahoo Inc. YHOO, +0.67%  has hired consultant McKinsey & Co. to help Mayer and her executive team decide which units should get increased investment and which should be closed or sold. A Boston investment lawyer is following this story closely.

Yahoo declined to comment for this article, and a spokesperson for McKinsey said the firm’s policy was “not to talk about or comment on our client work.”

Mayer was hired as Yahoo CEO, and joined the company’s board of directors, on July 17, 2012. She had previously worked at Google (now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. GOOG, -0.27% ) as vice president of product search. Mayer is the fourth CEO of Yahoo in eight years.

“It’s a bad sign that almost four years into a turnaround, you are hiring McKinsey to advise you on how to do a turnaround,” said Eric Jackson, a managing director at New York-based Ader Investment Management. Last month Jackson published an article calling for the ouster of Mayer. A Los Angeles finance lawyer has experience representing clients in asset sales, debt and equity finance claims and in financial restructuring cases.

In an interview Monday, Jackson said hiring the consultant “doesn’t inspire confidence that she knows what she is doing,” adding that “typically consultants are hired by many companies as a way of passing the buck to someone else if things don’t work out.”

Then again, according to a transcript provided by FactSet of Yahoo’s third-quarter 2014 earnings call, which took place on Oct. 21, 2014, Yahoo CFO Kenneth Goldman said the company had “engaged a top-tier management-consulting firm to help us achieve cost and structural efficiencies via benchmarking and implementing best practices.”

Not a ‘people person’?

The other major revelation in the Re/code article was that Mayer, “over the last month,” had asked high-level Yahoo executives to make commitments to stay with the company for at least three years.

Mayer said during Yahoo’s earnings conference call Oct. 20, according to a transcript provided by FactSet: “The design and changes in Yahoo’s leadership team are the result of careful planning to achieve the necessary skills, passion and the ability to execute growth in our business.” A Sacramento employment lawyer is reviewing the details of this story.

The timing of Mayer’s comment on the executive departures, along with Re/code’s report, throws Mayer’s skills as a personnel manager into question.

“If your boss comes to you and asks that, what are you going to say? No? People are going to be compelled to say ‘yes’ wether they want to say or not,” Jackson said.

He questioned why Mayer felt she needed the pledge. During the conference call, “she made it sound as though she had to make various moves to remove people and bring in others, and yet, when you hear that ... before some of those people left she asked for a pledge, it suggests a very different story than what she is telling publicly,” he said.

“All in all, it suggests a CEO who doesn’t know what the strategic vision is that she is following, and that she doesn’t have the support of the senior team around her.”

Ouch.

Being fair about Yahoo’s investments

The bulk of Yahoo’s value to investors is the company’s investment in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA, +0.13% and the company’s 35% stake in Yahoo Japan. Those investments were made long before Mayer took over Yahoo’s helm.

Yahoo valued its Alibaba investment at $22.6 billion as of Sept. 30, down 43% from its value of $39.9 billion a year earlier. But Jackson pointed out that bashing Yahoo for the timing of its spin-off of a unit holding the Alibaba stake was unfair, “since they were under a lockup agreement with Alibaba for a year after Alibaba. They couldn’t have sold it until September of this year, after it had already gone down.” Google SEO programs are cost-effective and powerful.

Investors’ decision on whether to hold Yahoo’s shares now, according to Jackson, are based on how you value the Alibaba stake.

“Some people think you have to tax it fully; some people think it will not be taxed,” he said.

It remains to be seen if the Internal Revenue Service will consider the spin-off of the Alibaba stake a tax-free event.

The value of Yahoo’s core business

According to FactSet, Yahoo’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) for the past 12 months totaled $642 million. That’s down from $1.42 billion during the 12-month period through June 2012 before Mayer became Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012.

That may seem like an unfair comparison, because Yahoo has increased its spending as Mayer has attempted to turn its long-term performance around. But after more than three years, and heading into another reorganization, investors have a right to wonder where those efforts might lead.

Jackson said that if the Alibaba and Yahoo Japan sakes are “stripped away,” the value of “the part of Yahoo Mayer has control over, is, essentially, zero.”

Considering how popular Yahoo’s website is, and the value of services like Yahoo Finance, it’s possible that the company is not being valued properly. After the Alibaba spin-off is completed, investors will need to reevaluate Yahoo’s stock.

Raising Morale is Goal of Yahoo's New Policy

Story first appeared on The New York Times -

When Marissa Mayer took over as chief executive at Yahoo last summer, she confronted a Silicon Valley campus that was very different from the one she had left at Google.

Parking lots and entire floors of cubicles were nearly empty because some employees were working as little as possible and leaving early.

Then there were the 200 or so people who had work-at-home arrangements. Although they collected Yahoo paychecks, some did little work for the company and a few had even begun their own start-ups on the side.

These were among the factors that led Ms. Mayer to announce last week that she was abolishing Yahoo’s work-from-home policy, saying that to create a new culture of innovation and collaboration at the company, employees had to report to work.

The announcement ignited a national debate over workplace flexibility — and within Yahoo has inspired much water cooler conversation and some concern.

But former and current Yahoo employees said that Ms. Mayer made the decision not as a referendum on working remotely, but to address problems particular to Yahoo. They painted a picture of a company where employees were aimless and morale was low, and a bloated bureaucracy had taken Yahoo out of competition with its more nimble rivals.

“In the tech world it was such a bummer to say you worked for Yahoo,” said a former senior employee who, like many Yahoo insiders, would speak only anonymously to preserve professional relationships. The employee added, “I’ve heard she wants to make Yahoo young and cool.”

Restoring Yahoo’s cool — from revitalizing behind-the-times products to reversing deteriorating morale and culture — is hard to do if people are not there, Ms. Mayer concluded. That view was reflected in Yahoo’s only statement on the work-at-home policy change: “This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home. This is about what is right for Yahoo, right now.”

Yahoo declined to comment further.

On Monday, another ailing company, Best Buy, announced that it, too, would no longer permit employees to work remotely, reversing one of the most permissive flexible workplace policies in the business world.

Inside Yahoo, there has been mixed reaction to the policy change. Some employees said that they were able to be highly productive by working remotely, and that it helped them concentrate on work instead of the chaos inside Yahoo.

Brandon Holley, former editor of Shine, Yahoo’s women’s site, said she built the site and signed on big-name advertisers while she and most of her team worked from homes across the country.

“It grew very rapidly,” said Ms. Holley, who is now editor of Lucky, Condé Nast’s shopping magazine. “A lot of that had to do with the lack of distraction in a very distracted company.”

The change to the work-at-home policy initially angered some employees who had such arrangements, and worried others who occasionally stayed home to care for a sick child or receive a delivery. Reports that Ms. Mayer built a nursery for her young son next to her office made parents working at Yahoo even angrier.

This week, the policy continued to be the topic of much discussion at the company, as people wondered aloud whether they would lose that flexibility, said employees who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

But for the most part, those employees said, those concerns have been eased by managers who assured them that the real targets of Yahoo’s memo were the approximately 200 employees who work from home full time.

One manager said he told his employees, “Be here when you can. Use your best judgment. But if you have to stay home for the cable guy or because your kid is sick, do it.”

Many of Yahoo’s problems are visible to people outside the company. It missed the two biggest trends on the Internet — social networking and mobile. Its home page and e-mail services had become relics used by people who had never bothered to change their habits. It ceded its crown as the biggest seller of display ads to Facebook and Google. Its stock price was plummeting.

Inside the company, though, there were deeper cultural issues invisible from the outside. For Ms. Mayer’s ambitious plans to turn around the company to work, employees briefed on her strategy said, she believed Yahoo needed “all hands on deck.”

Jackie Reses, Yahoo’s director of human resources and the author of the new policy, is an extreme example of this philosophy. She commutes to Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale, Calif., from her home in New York, where she lives with her children.

“Morale was terrible because the company was thought to be dying,” said a former manager at Yahoo, who would speak only anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When you have those root issues, an employee work force that is not terribly motivated, it built bad habits over years.”

Yahoo has withstood many changes over the years, starting with a turnover of six chief executives in five years, each with his or her own deputies and missions for the company. This led to confusion among the work force about the company’s goals and frustration that projects would be pulled midstream by a new chief executive.

The company had hired many managers to oversee new tech products, but the extra levels of management slowed product development, former employees said.

“Where Yahoo competes, with companies like Facebook churning out a new release every single day, there was a lot of bloat slowing down product decisions,” the former manager said.

The new policy is the first unpopular big move Ms. Mayer has made. Yahoo insiders said they did not expect the employee and media outcry that followed.

Employees said that unlike previous chief executives, who focused outside Yahoo, she has prioritized fixing the company internally and motivating employees.

She introduced free food in the cafeterias, swapped employees’ BlackBerrys for iPhones and Android phones and started a Friday all-employee meeting where executives take questions and speak candidly.

A recent internal employee survey found that 95 percent of employees were optimistic about the company’s future, a 32 percent bump from the previous survey, Ms. Mayer said in a call with analysts in January.

Résumés have begun arriving from employees at competitors like Facebook and Google, which rarely happened in the past, according to one person briefed on Yahoo hiring.

Since Ms. Mayer made food free, there are now crowds in the cafeterias, lingering to talk about new ideas, employees say — exactly what she wants to encourage by requiring people to work in the office.

“I understand why Marissa Mayer would want to call everybody back into work,” Ms. Holley said. “It’s kind of a necessary step.”

The New Yahoo.com Homepage

Story first appeared on Business Insider -

Marissa Mayer made her fame and fortune at Google, where she was responsible for the original design of Google.com. And now, two months after becoming Yahoo CEO, she has updated Yahoo.com. A new version is slowly being rolled out into the wild, and we've got a screen-grab that a source close to Yahoo tells us is authentic.

Yahoo.com is Yahoo's most important product. ComScore says 170 million people visit Yahoo sites everyday, and a huge percentage of them are funneled to this page. Its ad units are perhaps the most valuable on the Internet. Sources tell us more changes are on the way. The page is going to get more personalized and customizable, we hear.

• The search bar is now centered, and is part of a darker toolbar that is fixed to the top of the page as the user scrolls down.
• The Yahoo! logo is smaller, and no longer purple.
• The word "search" has been replaced with a magnifying glass icon.
• There are far fewer links to Yahoo Sites on the left side. Losers are: Dating, Flickr, Games, Jobs, Messenger, Music, My Yahoo!, and TV.
• Local weather has its own module.
• What's trending has been de-emphasized and moved to the left column.
• There is now a second large story tout below the top stories.
• Instead of just headlines, the news river has story summaries.
• Astrology has its own module.

Mayer (Yahoo) Looking for Mobile Growth

Article first appeared on CNBC -

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is confident that her company will be able to capitalize on the explosion in mobile communication, saying Yahoo will focus on strong partnerships with Apple, Google and Facebook.

"The nice thing at Yahoo is we have all of the content that people want on their phones. We have these daily habits. Whenever you're dealing with a daily habit, and really providing a lot of value around it,there's an opportunity," Mayer said at the World Economic Forum in Davos,Switzerland on Friday.

"There's really an opportunity for strong partnerships. That's what we'll be focused on. So we work with for example Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of the social network we have a strong partnership with Facebook," she said.

She played down mobile privacy concerns, saying it would always be "something users should consider."

"But I also think that privacy is always a trade-off. When you give up some of your personal information, you get some functionality in return. It's really about making those trade-offs in a very informed way," she said.

Yahoo to Compensate Mayer $100 Million

Story first reported from wsj.com

Yahoo Inc. showed just how big it is betting that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can change its fortunes.

Ms. Mayer will receive up to $100 million in compensation, stock, bonus and retention awards over the next five years, according to a Thursday regulatory filing by the Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company.

Ms. Mayer is expected to receive around $5.4 million from Yahoo for the remainder of this year and around $20 million a year after that, though some of that amount is tied to performance targets set by the board.

While it is hard to make a direct comparison, Ms. Mayer's predecessors, Scott Thompson and Carol Bartz, received compensation packages worth $27 million and $44.6 million, respectively, over several years. Both CEOs departed prematurely. Mr. Thompson resigned in May after a five-month stint, while Ms. Bartz was fired last fall after more than 2½ years at Yahoo.

Ms. Mayer, 37 years old, joined Yahoo as CEO on Tuesday after a 13-year career at rival Google Inc., where most recently she was a vice president of local, maps and location services.

The Yahoo pay package includes restricted stock units valued at $14 million in order to "partially compensate" Ms. Mayer for forfeiting her compensation from Google. It also includes a one-time retention award that is valued at $15 million and will vest over five years.

Ms. Mayer wasn't one of Google's top officers and so her compensation wasn't publicly disclosed, but she was employee No. 20 at the Internet search firm and received a windfall in the company's 2004 initial public offering.

Mark Reilly, a partner at 3C Compensation Consulting Consortium LLC in Chicago, said that Ms. Mayer's compensation package seemed "reasonable and competitive" given that Yahoo is "a huge company, a turnaround situation, and they got someone who was doing a fantastic job" at Google. Such a package is "needed to attract that type of talent," he said.

Ms. Mayer faces the challenge of turning around onetime Internet pioneer Yahoo, which has more than 700 million monthly unique visitors to its news, sports, entertainment and email sites but has failed to develop innovative Web services and is far behind its competitors in offering sophisticated tools for advertisers to buy ads on its sites.

Yahoo on Tuesday reported second-quarter profit dropped 4% from a year earlier to $227 million, while revenue slipped 1% to $1.22 billion.

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Marissa Mayer Becomes Yahoo CEO

Story first reported from USA Today

Just days after Yahoo tapped former Google executive Marissa Mayer for its CEO post, the 37-year-old has taken on another high-profile role. After announcing that she was pregnant — and wouldn't let that interfere with her work duties — Mayer took center stage in the nation's often-heated debate over women's roles at home and in the workplace.

Reaction was swift, and in some cases, scorching, as her matter-of-fact declaration took on a life of its own in social media. Countless posts on Facebook, Twitter and throughout the blogosphere criticized her decision to keep working. Others warned that Mayer, who is expecting her first child, had underestimated the challenges of being a mom.

Much of the scrutiny comes because of the unique circumstances in play, says Laura Graves, associate professor of management at the Graduate School of Management at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Not just a female CEO, but one who is expecting. Society has not given up traditional gender roles yet, she says.

And so Mayer's swift move to take over and revive the struggling Yahoo brand was quickly eclipsed this week by talk of her parenting choices, the pros and cons of taking a long maternity leave, female ascension in the workplace and the challenges of work-life balance.

Some of the myriad armchair critics have also suggested that her vast wealth and high-level position give her an edge — indeed, the luxury — that other working mothers don't have.

But it has gotten better

Though few would argue that raising a child while working has ever been easy, a series of advances since the 1960s have at least changed the circumstances faced by working mothers in the United States.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission laws came into force prohibiting discrimination against new and expecting mothers, workplaces began offering greater flexibility. Today, telecommuting and on-site day care are more common.

Even so, many practical questions remain. How do the mental and physical drains of pregnancy affect a woman's performance at work? How much time does a mother need to recover physically after giving birth? What are the logistics of planning out child care?

Polling still reflects a deep cultural skepticism of mothers who decide to return to work.

In a 2010 report, the Pew Research Center found that 21% of adults in the USA said the trend toward mothers of young children working outside the home has been a good thing for society. Thirty-seven percent deemed it a bad thing, and 38% said it hasn't made much difference.

Deena Rosenberg, 29, of Teaneck, N.J., just returned to work at a public relations firm after a 12-week maternity leave for her first child. She says she has a good friend, also 29, who questioned her decision to go back to work and put her son in day care.

But even Rosenberg has concerns about Mayer's plans to work during her official maternity leave.
She sets a bad precedent and the corporations will now expect that to be normal maternity-leave behavior, she says


Celebs make it look easy.

High-profile women in areas such as business, politics and fashion have garnered headlines with their examples of what looks like an easy return to work.

Sarah Palin, who was governor of Alaska when she gave birth to her youngest son in 2008, was back on the job just three days later. Model Heidi Klum gave birth in October 2009 and sauntered back onto the Victoria's Secret runway in November. Then-expecting singer-turned-fashion designer Victoria Beckham told Glamour magazine in June 2011 that she planned to work right until her fourth child was born.

But as with Mayer, these women have resources that other working moms don't. They can hire full-time help. They are also in entrepreneurial or leadership roles that tend to give them more professional power than other workers.

Even with that cash and caché, some mothers predict that these women will lose out on certain things because of their demanding work schedules.

Elana Drell-Szyfer, CEO of cosmetics company AHAVA North America and a mother of three, says that working after her first child's birth was more difficult than she expected.

She figured she could manage business e-mails and other needs, but she was surprised by how much time it took to take care of her baby — and by the drain on her.

She recalls the night she realized she couldn't keep up.

While trying to nurse the baby and work on her laptop at the same time, Drell-Szyfer says she realized she couldn’t bond with her child, and didn’t appear professional answering emails at 3 a.m.

A double standard?

In June 2011, gossip website Gawker reported that Google co-founder Larry Page was expecting his second child. That was two months after Page took the CEO title at the technology behemoth. There were no follow-up headlines, no social media debates, no loud conversations about how he could lead an Internet giant and still be a father.

As for Yahoo, its board didn't seem to flinch at Mayer's pregnancy. Company representatives and Mayer — the company's fifth CEO in five years — weren't available for comment, but in a news release, Yahoo board Chairman Fred Amoroso said Mayer's   record in technology, design and product execution makes her the right leader for Yahoo.

Mayer, who was previously an executive at Google, said in the Fortune interview that Yahoo's directors "showed their evolved thinking."

As much as society has evolved, women still face the greater scrutiny when they decide to return to work after having children, says Rosalind Chait Barnett, a senior scientist at Brandeis University's Women's Studies Research Center.

She says that a man in Mayer’s position and his wife were expecting, people wouldn’t be talking about it. Women and men will wonder if she can do it, but that is a pressure men don’t have to deal with, Barnett says.

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Testimony of Marissa Mayer Vice President, Search Products and User Experience Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet Hearing on "The Future of Journalism" May 6, 2009

Chairman Kerry, Ranking Member Ensign, and members of the Subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this discussion. My name is Marissa Mayer, and I work as Vice President of Search and User Experience at Google. I manage Google's efforts in search -- including Web search and Google News -- and I also guide user interaction design across Google's products. In addition, I co-chair the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. In both roles, I've reflected on the intersections of journalism and technology and I will speak to that this afternoon.

In my testimony today, I would like to cover three main points:
First, I'd like to discuss how Web search acts as a conduit for journalism by connecting individuals to the news stories they are seeking.
Second, I'll address our commitment to create economic opportunity for publishers and to provide tools to create more engaging presentations of their content.
And finally, I'll talk about how the very structure of the Web itself represents some challenges to, but also opportunities for, the future of journalism.

Search: a conduit for online publishing
Every day, millions of people search the Web for relevant answers to their questions. In response, search engines strive to connect each user with the right results, and those results can come in any number of different forms: a Web page, an image, a video, a map, or a news story – something of particular relevance to today's hearing. In each of those cases, search engines play the role of connecting users with high-quality content -- often journalistic -- ultimately sending traffic to the publisher's Website. Google is one such search engine that people use to find answers online. Another service we offer is Google News, our specialized service that's designed specifically for users who are looking for news articles. Stories on Google News are selected and ranked by computers based on the freshness, location, relevance, and diversity of their content. As a result, these stories are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, and users can choose from a wide variety of perspectives on any given story. We offer links to several articles covering a topic so that users can choose to read the story from the publishers and sources they prefer.

Both Google search and Google News connect users to answers and information as quickly as possible. We show people just enough information to invite them to read more -- the headline, a line or two of text, and a link to the news publisher's Website. A user clicks on the headline of interest and is taken directly to the site that published the story.

Together, Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue.

In terms of publications appearing in search indexes, we believe they have the right to control their content. That's why we allow site owners to choose whether or not Google can index their sites. Using what's called a “robots.txt” file, which has been an industry standard for many years, a publisher can block its Web content from any search engine's crawl. As a result, that site will not show up in Web search results. Effective use of "robots.txt" and other metatags gives publishers control over how their content is searched at a number of levels by allowing publishers to restrict: search across the entire site, individual directories, pages of a specific type, or individual pages only. So, while we think inclusion in a search engine can drive a lot of beneficial traffic, our policy first and foremost is to respect the wishes of content owners.

Creating economic opportunity for publishers
Because our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, high-quality content is incredibly important to Google. Our most basic goal is to connect users with high quality and reliable information. Credible, factual, trustworthy content -- that is, journalism -- is critical to the millions of users who search for news stories on Google. Google connects Internet users to journalists' work while at the same time helping journalists generate
income to support their work, and providing tools to make news more compelling to readers and viewers. Most importantly from an economic perspective, once readers arrive at publication sites, our Google AdSense advertising platform helps publishers generate revenue from their content. By providing relevant ads and improving the connection between advertisers and our users, Google AdSense creates billions of dollars in annual revenue for publishers. In fact, in 2008, that figure exceeded $5 billion in revenue for AdSense publishers. Users get more useful ads, and these more relevant ads generate higher returns for advertisers and publishers. We recently launched interest-based advertising, which we believe will be particularly helpful to publishers as it takes into account each individual user's interests in the hopes of making advertisements even more relevant.

In addition to providing revenue opportunities, Google also offers many tools for sharing information that are being used by newspapers. For example, the Los Angeles Times Website last year followed the path of Southern California wildfires using Google Maps at the site. Google Image Search brings the Life Magazine photo archive to light for a whole new generation of readers. National Geographic and The Holocaust Memorial Museum have created interactive educational content layers in Google Earth. And NASA has partnered with us to allow anyone to virtually travel the stars in Google Sky. Our Web technologies are powerful information tools, and we hope to continue to empower content creation through them.

The structure of the Web and its impact on publishers
The structure of the Web itself requires the presentation of news in a way that's fundamentally different from its offline predecessor. The Web has caused some parts of the news to be presented more easily and effectively. For example, Web pages can link to voluminous supporting materials without worrying about column inches. In addition, the always-on, always-updating nature of the Web means that real-time news updates can appear throughout the day without being tied to print production deadlines. However, other aspects are more challenging, particularly in regard to how users arrive at a news story, and how authority on a particular topic is established. I'd like to offer a few observations on what I call the "atomic unit of consumption" for online news, the prospect of creating living stories online, as well as a few simple steps online publishers can take to keep readers engaged.
The atomic unit of consumption
The atomic unit of consumption for existing media is almost always disrupted by emerging media. For example, digital music caused consumers to think about their purchases as individual songs rather than as full albums. Digital and on-demand video has caused people to view variable-length clips when it is convenient for them, rather than fixed-length programs on a fixed broadcast schedule. Similarly, the structure of the Web has caused the atomic unit of consumption for news to migrate from the full newspaper to the individual article. As with music and video, many people still consume physical newspapers in their original full-length format.

But with online news, a reader is much more likely to arrive at a single article. While these
individual articles could be accessed from a newspaper's homepage, readers often click directly to a particular article via a search engine or another Website.

Changing the basic unit of content consumption is a challenge, but also an opportunity. Treating the article as the atomic unit of consumption online has several powerful consequences. When producing an article for online news, the publisher must assume that a reader may be viewing this article on its own, independent of the rest of the publication. To make an article effective in a standalone setting requires providing sufficient context for first-time readers, while clearly calling out the latest information for those following a story over time. It also requires a different approach to monetization: each individual article should be self-sustaining.

These types of changes will require innovation and experimentation in how news is delivered online, and how advertising can support it.

The living story
The Web by definition changes and updates constantly throughout the day. Because of its ability to operate in real-time, it offers an opportunity for news publishers to publish on changing and evolving stories as they happen. Web addresses (known as URLs -- uniform resource locators such as http://www.google.com) were designed to refer to unique pieces of content, and those URLs were intended to persist over time. Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL.

The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results. Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia's entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

Keeping users engaged
A much smaller but important factor for online newspapers to consider in today's digital age is the fundamental design and presentation of their content. Publishers should not discount the simple and effective navigational elements the Web can offer. When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication's responsibility to answer the reader who asks, "What should I do next?" Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users.

Today, there are still many publications that don't fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.

Conclusion
Chairman Kerry, Ranking Member Ensign, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for having me here today to participate in this important discussion. Preserving robust and independent journalism at the national and local levels is an important goal for the United States. Google is doing its part by driving significant traffic to online news publishers, by helping them
generate revenue through advertising, and by providing tools and platforms enabling them to reach millions of people.

There are certainly many challenges to face in adapting the long tradition of journalism to the online world. I am hopeful, though, that innovation will help preserve journalism and its vital function in our society.
Thank you.