"They never had a lot of success in media, at least not past their early properties like Finance and Autos."
News was launched in 1996, roughly a year after Yahoo became Yahoo and only four months after the IPO. News is most definitely an early success.
Yahoo's problem (or one of them) is that they've failed to have any significant new successes in well over a decade (that I can recall at least). The best they've done is maintain their early wins, but those have been eroded, as they completely lost search and mail to Google, much of the news/finance/autos/sports traffic to dozens of competitors, etc.
