Yahoo intranet “Backyard” amusing, witty, informative in the style of The Daily Show

The “Grand Prize: Best Overall Intranet” award in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards goes to … Yahoo. For many solid reasons, including: 

• The best, wittiest employee news show (“Hoo News”) our judges have seen. 
• The best use of a celebrity-expert (David Pogue) to publicize the company’s products. 
• The best intranet infographics about company services and products. 
• The best re-do of the old intranet: from busy, cluttered darkness to sweet, simple light.
• The best new hybrid story, an infographic/feature article about an employee.  
• The best company news about its new ventures.

The tone of Hoo News is hip, knowing, sarcastic, and more than slightly self-mocking. Take, for instance, David Pogue going off on an extended metaphysical tangent about the expression “dogfooding” as a tech metaphor. This sequence, like all the Hoo News clips entered, remains interesting and funny even after three or four viewings. And it’s effortlessly informative about the Yahoo products it pushes. In addition, Sarah and Dave, the woman and man who co-anchor the Hoo News “newscast team,” are skilled comedians who play off one another with perfect comic timing, like Jon Stewart and John Oliver. 

The list of “bests” and impressive stats goes on:

• The best retention and recruitment intranet feature we’ve seen (“Why Yahoo?”).
• The best and widest variety of features on Hoo News.
• 85 percent of Yahoo employees visit Backyard daily; this number increases steadily.
• 91 percent of employees say that Backyard is a source of truth for them.
• 81 percent think that the stories on Backyard reflect the culture of innovation at Yahoo.
• Hoo News is “incredibly popular,” ranking in the top three stories by page views the week it airs.

Congratulations to Yahoo communicators Sarah Tompkins, Nicole Baudouin, Caitlin Millar, and Carolyn Clark!