The "Top 40's" of News

Child of the Top 40's: Growing up, every child from the Dallas area knew 106.1 Kiss FM.  When the jingle came on and the commercials ended, you knew you were about to hear the newest Brittany Spears song or chart topping Backstreet Boys tune. And in the age where iTunes was only in its infant stages, it was difficult to find music outside of those 40 familiar hits that played on most every radio station on loop. Just as the author of “The Long Tail Economy” states, we were “subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics.”  I was completely unaware of the labyrinth of punk rock and rap and jazz that I would eventually fill my head…until I got an iPod.  From then on out, my iTunes library expanded along with my horizons.  It housed the soundtrack of my life as I grew up. The author continues, explaining that many of us finally wandered “further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought.” But I never would have thought that my random scattered taste in music would be the main moneymaker.  Didn’t top 40’s hits still rule the music world? That is why they are hits?

Chris Anderson’s article about the “long tail” economy completely caught me off guard. He claims, “If the 20th- century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses,” due to one main evolution: we are now free from the chains of physical space. Before, we operated in a world of entertainment scarcity, only watching what the Blockbuster would stock and listening to the CD’s Target deemed high earners. Anderson says, “now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance.” And in that abundance—every under-the-radar book series and underground band—lies the big money.  

Adult in the Online News Age: So as a journalist, my next question was…how do news outlets take advantage of these long-tail profits? If you believe in traditional reporting, our content is not necessarily new or unique but rather cold, hard, unchanging facts. But, similar to the entertainment industry, we are no longer confined to the physical space of newspaper layouts or limited one hour newscasts. Readers can click to the next article endlessly.  They start reading the headline and end up watching a video of a panda bear hugging an elephant baby in a zoo in a far away city. 

The Journal of Media Economics published a study (http://dct.nctu.edu.tw/files/faculty_files/fct_15/Huang_2014a.pdf) that discusses how content diversity, niche content, and filtering drove up traffic on news sites. For example, USA Today has over 459 content categories to choose from. They cited one study that surveyed "five mediums’ top 10 news stories and found that 40% of the top stories on news sites were not covered by newspapers, network television, cable television. (2010, http://jmq.sagepub.com/content/92/3/700.full.pdf+html). 

Is this the same phenomenon as the long-tail in the entertainment industry? Are mainstream news sites covering hits while alternative sites with filters and subcategories and niche content really attracting more readers and viewers? And what does this say about the future of news.  Are people just not interested in what has traditionally made headlines? These were all questions that "The Long Tail Economy" raised. And these are the questions that journalists like myself will have to begin to answer.