"'A Way Forward in Afghanistan' by Jamie Kennedy"
"The Daily Show Was Funny Yesterday... You Should Watch It Embedded Next To Our Ads"

We've been told repeatedly that the age of digital information would help people congregate around idiosyncratic interests, inspire producers to serve infinite niche markets, and make everybody more diversely and individualistically happy.

But what if the Internet age is making cultural consumers more herd-like? Is the world of online culture more homogenized than the offline environment? The analysis behind this graph would indicate that we are now less likely to purchase obscure niche products.

While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.

... Here are Lorentz curves for Internet World (blue) and Offline World (green), in which the products are lined up in order of increasing popularity along the x axis, and the cumulative choices for those products is plotted up the Y axis.

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

 

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

Lots of interesting thoughts in this post, but there's still plenty of reason to be skeptical about the idea that there is a sustainable midpoint between anonymity and stardom. Food for thought, regardless.

[H/T Virginia Postrel]

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

 

So says Sasha Anawalt of the USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Program. I think this means there's a big opportunity for arts and culture critics and "curators." Somebody needs to help create and filter news and recommendations about the arts and culture (especially online).

For those keeping track of such things, take note: Journalism is about to get its first low-profit, limited liability corporation, or L3C.

The new Chicago News Cooperative, unveiled on Thursday by former Chicago Tribune managing editor Jim O’Shea, will begin life as a nonprofit, but will change over to an L3C after Jan. 1, when a new Illinois law takes effect,

Interesting. I wonder if this structure will actually be more complicated than a 501c3 non-profit. Regardless, it's an interesting development for media (and maybe think tanks?).

From the Knight Digital Media Center:

At Slate, small is the new big

Editor David Plotz sees a future with a smaller, highly engaged audience for the online magazine

I took heart from a talk this week by Slate editor David Plotz, who suggested a viable revenue future for his online magazine lies not in its approximately seven million unique visitors but in about 500,000 loyal, engaged users who want quality, long form journalism...

More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change focus from mass audience, Plotz believes, and that will make journalism better. Raw numbers create “pressure to produce one kind of story” that will draw hits. New metrics of engagement and behavior offer a “tremendous opportunity for Web journalism to escape the traffic” trap. He believes that will liberate Slate to “make a magazine that recognizes those dedicated readers.”

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this abiltity to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

So forget celebrity and outrage stories. For Slate, this focus means a commitment to long form journalism such as a recent series on the American dental crisis, which Plotz estimates was read by 400,000 people. Slate has started a “Fresca Fellowship” that requires each reporter and editor to spend a month each year on a long form journalism project. Advertisers have begun to sponsor specific projects and they are paying for themselves, he said.

“Advertisers want to be around some ambitious project more than they want to be around some snarky political column,” Plotz said...

Plotz thinking about a smaller engaged audience is similar to what could emerge in local news markets as news organizations pay more attention to small, under served advertisers. Serving up big numbers of unengaged users won’t ultimately help these advertisers. Developing loyal, engaged user communities holds more promise...

I hope that Plotz is right. The alternative would seem to be the the sea of snark, soft core, and onanistic outrage that we see at the Huffington Post.

Via Magnify