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Yes, he is right that breaking news/milliseconds count is the opposite of the long tail. That is not the content I was referring to.

Here is the problem news organizations face…

Serving a niche audience with high value content can be extremely profitable but its value degrades rapidly as the content leaves that niche and is delivered to a general audience in a commoditized form.

Jarvis’ example of Reuters concerned timeliness: the niche audience was in high finance; the added value of the information derived from its status as breaking news.

Bob Wyman’s examples from Science, Law and Governance concerned expertise: the niche audiences were in the various professions; the added value of the information was what he calls deep news.

The “long tail” question that I was ruminating on was the problem for either news organization — Thomson Reuters or professional publishers. How do they approach the consumer news part of their operation, repurposing their niche journalism for a general audience? The audience for each individual piece of content is small but their online archives are vast and searchable — and so in aggregate, but only in aggregate, this long tail is potentially profitable in an ad-supported, non-subscription model.

I agree with Wyman that deep news organizations are liable to have more success at monetizing their archives than breaking news organizations. His suggestion that MainStreamMedia — my term, not his — should seek out niche professional publishers for rewrites and summaries of deep news for their general audiences seems sound.

As for Reuters, I argue that their pathetic 2% of revenues derived from ad-supported, consumer news, speaks to the superficiality of their breaking content. The point I was making was that breaking news organizations are lazy, generally speaking, about repurposing content for their long tail, not realizing that information that had been most valuable by virtue of its timeliness tends to have least residual value, in inverse proportion.

Thus the type of story that Reuters should headline in its ad-supported consumer news phase should be different from the ones that it made most money from in their millisecond phase. As Jarvis likes to say, journalism online has to be organized not by timeliness but by subject matter — not by story but by topic.

What definition of “long tail” are we using?

The common definition is “long tail is low value transactions”. You can make a lot of money on low value transactions IF your costs are low enough. However, the breaking news/milliseconds counts transactions aren’t low-value – they’re high value.

The above seems to use a definition like “long tail is low volume transactions”, but since the long tail is almost always associated with “there’s a lot of them”, that seems wrong.