This article in the WSJ today talks about how Yahoo! News has surpassed CNN in unique visitors.

In six of the past 14 months, Yahoo’s news site has drawn more unique visitors than any rival, displacing longtime news leader CNN.com, according to research firm Nielsen/NetRatings.

However, in March MSNBC.com edged out Yahoo! News (no figures on by how much where giving in the article). The majority of the users of these two sites come from their respective networks (i.e., MSN.com and Yahoo.com). None the less, a pretty impressive showing from both of these sites… and definitely a concern to “mainstream media.” Google’s fully computer-generated news site ranks number 11.

The article also talks about Yahoo!’s “hybrid” approach of using computers to manage and display stories and links along with human editors to collect “full coverage” pages linking to stories on important events.

Today, Yahoo! also released a beta version of their new news site today. Here’s a link to the splash page describing the new site. The copy is actually pretty good with titles like, “Compare Sources Side-by-Side,” and, “Play Favorite,” etc. Not a lot of technobabel, which makes sense since with Yahoo!’s reach, they are clearly going after the mainstream.

In playing around on the beta site, I couldn’t get some of the RSS features to work properly. You’re supposed to be able to display your RSS feeds from My Yahoo! in Yahoo! News, but I couldn’t get this to work (of course, it is a beta). In addition, Yahoo! doesn’t give a lot of UI space for your RSS feeds. It will be interesting to see how Yahoo! balances traditional sources vs. RSS sources in the future (currently, almost all of the balance is on the side of traditional sources).

I’d rate the beta site a big improvement over the old site. However, I still like Topix’s look-and-feel a lot better.