All entries tagged: long tail
How a blog, a camera, and a court are feeding journalism’s long tail
When people talk about the long tail, they often focus on consumer goods, where the infinite shelf space at a company like Amazon or Netflix allows a huge variety of products to be sold. But the same concept can apply to news, where cheap servers make it possible for hyper-targeted coverage — the stuff that only appeals to a few hundred people — to live online with few concerns about space or scarcity. Toss in search engines and dead-simple publishing tools and you’ve got a bounty of easy-to-find, niche-friendly content.
Whether intended or not, Ron Sylvester is stocking the long tail. The veteran crime and courts reporter for The Wichita Eagle uses his blog What the Judge Ate for Breakfast to publish two-minute videos that dive into the intricacies of a courthouse. They’re fascinating clips, touching on everything from the role of prosecutors, to odd defendant behavior, to the less glamorous responsibilities judges assume. These glimpses into the life of a court are classic examples of long tail content: the type of stuff that would never see the light of day on traditional platforms.
It makes sense that something like this would come from Sylvester. He was one of the first beat reporters to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, tweeting updates from the courtroom. The positive response to the Twitter coverage encouraged him, and he started looking at different techniques for covering his beat. “There’s so much human drama in the courthouse,” he said. “I’m trying to find ways to expand the coverage and use multimedia to do that.” Keep reading »
How to get ahead of the meme
The fascinating, if flawed, meme-tracking study that I wrote about yesterday is full of rich data on the mechanics of American political journalism. To review: The paper analyzes commonly repeated phrases from a broad swath of media coverage in the last three months of the 2008 presidential election. Phrases like “lipstick on a pig,” “No way, no how, no McCain,” and “Hey, can I call you Joe?” (Aw, don’t you miss the campaign?) The study’s authors hoped to determine the speed, duration, and evolution of those phrases, which they refer to as memes.
What you’re looking at above is the average time between particular news organizations first mentioning a phrase and its peak among all news sites and blogs. (Here’s a larger version.) For instance, the conservative blog Hot Air typically reported on a phrase 26.5 hours before it became a veritable meme, putting the site furthest ahead of the pack. But it’s worth noting that Hot Air only ever reported on 42 of the 100 most-popular memes, whereas The Huffington Post mentioned 73 of them and was still, on average, 18 hours ahead. The New York Times political blog The Caucus was generally 11 hours ahead — between ABC News and Politico — while reporting on 43 of the top 100 memes. (The data is on the study’s website.)
For my graphic, I’ve played with the paper’s cardinal curves, which represent the volume of mentions for your average political meme, spiking in a matter of hours and dissipating nearly as fast. Yesterday I dwelled on the difference between the red and green curves, but today it doesn’t matter. A few other caveats: The long tail at left was drawn by me and isn’t quite precise. The data for Talking Points Memo only represents TPM DC (née TPM Election Central), and The Associated Press data is from the AP feed on a site called My Way, which might not be as fast as the news service.
It’s tempting to view this chart from left to right — as in, who scooped whom — but remember that nearly all of these memes originated from public statements by the candidates, so it might be a question of which news outlets engaged in the most group think (to use Jay Rosen’s favored term for political reporting). When I spoke to Jon Kleinberg, an author of the study, he offered several interpretations, including what he described as a “two-step flow of influence.” Sites like Hot Air and TPM identify phrases of potential importance, while CNN, ABC, and Politico, in turn, transform the message into a meme. Then the AP conveys the conventional wisdom.
Review: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” by Chris Anderson
Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review found that some passages in the book directly matched Wikipedia entries. (Anderson quickly apologized, blaming inaccurate citing and overall carelessness.)
Then, of course, there’s the actual content of the book, which has been received by journalists and business-minded folks in decidedly polarizing ways. Malcolm Gladwell unleashed a scathing review of Free in last week’s New Yorker, scolding Anderson for adhering to the freeconomy as an “iron law” and writing, “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” (Plenty of responses followed.)
But for Anderson, Free is indeed the ultimate destiny of our economy. “Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another,” he writes in the beginning of the book. This assertion will probably look depressingly familiar to journalists who’ve watched their traditional business models fall apart in the wild west of the web, where “free” is the gold standard. Keep reading »
