What’s next for Yahoo post-Thompson?

It seems like just yesterday that a fiery Carol Bartz directed her final f-bomb at Yahoo’s board after she was shown the door. But Yahoo’s CEO door just can’t stop revolving. Now Scott Thompson, who led the company for just six months, has stepped down following a flap over his resume. Ross Levinsohn, the company’s newly elected interim chief, is the company’s sixth CEO in just five years, and many are left wondering what’s next for the struggling Internet firm. As CNNMoney’s Julianne Pepitone wrote, “Now that Thompson’s resume-embellishing scandal has reached a resolution, Yahoo will be forced to confront new questions—and longtime issues that are still unsettled—on its rough road to reinvention.” Many industry watchers are speculating that by tapping Levinsohn, who headed up Yahoo’s global media business, the company is stepping up its media efforts. If Levinsohn “gets to run Yahoo the way he wants to run Yahoo, he’ll focus on getting the most out of its media business, because that’s his strength,” explained AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka.

But will that be enough for Yahoo to move forward as a media company? That’s hard to say. With increasing competition from the likes of Google and Facebook, the company faces some serious hurdles. Levinsohn will have to deal with “Yahoo’s weak revenue growth and threats from technology rivals,” explained the Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati. “Yahoo’s ad-sales business also faces competition from numerous media websites such as Walt Disney Co.-owned ESPN.com and Hulu.” But the biggest challenge Levinsohn & Co. face is thinking about media in a different way, said GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram. It’s the “same challenge newspapers face: Just as they got used to being the main destination for people in search of content when paper was the dominant delivery system, Yahoo still seems to be stuck in a mindset that sees media as a game of scale, where the player with the most eyeballs wins.”

• Ross Levinsohn’s Yahoo Plan: Back to the Future (AllThingsD)

• Does Yahoo even know how to be a modern media company? (GigaOm)

• Who is Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo’s New Interim CEO? (Wall Street Journal)

• Yahoo CEO’s Downfall (Wall Street Journal)

• Levinsohn Becomes Interim Yahoo CEO, Replacing Thompson (MediaPost)

• Why Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson had to resign (The Washington Post)

• Yahoo CEO Departs Amid Inquiry; Loeb Wins Board Shake-Up (Bloomberg)

• Yahoo’s CEO is out. Now what? (CNNMoney)

• Interim Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn straddles tech and media worlds (Los Angeles Times)

• The Truth About Why Yahoo’s CEO Got Fired (ReadWriteWeb)

• CEO Says Sorry to Yahoos for Borked Bio “Distraction” — But Will Mea Culpa Work Without an Apology for Error? (AllThingsD)