Large national papers are like the daily news equivalent of a blockbuster music or movie hit: they provide a little bit of something for everyone. And given recent trends, popular music, movies and newspapers may very well be fading in importance: record sales, box office revenues and circulations have been declining for some time.

But this is just where the long tail begins. For people searching for obscure or forgotten songs or movies, the "unlimited shelf space" of the Internet is perfect. "Obscure" and "forgotten", however, are not adjectives that describe newspaper content.

Many newspapers charge for their archives. But most of the information people seek from past articles is well documented in various other sources for free.

Let's take the favorite example of the New York Times. Before the Gray Lady launched its online subscription service, TimesSelect, one spokesperson divulged that the Times was pulling about a million dollars from people buying archived articles. Not bad. But perception changes when you look at the numbers.

Individual articles back then, if I remember correctly, cost $2.95 (today they're at $3.95). If the Times annually earned a million, that means they sold a little over 333,000 archived articles over the course of the year. Still not too shabby. But during that time, nytimes.com claimed almost 10 million unique readers per day (today it's over 12 million). So considering that figure, 1/3 of a million archived articles sold in a year is not that impressive. There is no doubt that many of those 10 million readers may have liked to access an archived article but were deterred by its relatively high cost. (side note: wouldn't it be great to see figures for how many TimesSelect subscribers access archived articles?) 

Now look at iTunes, Apple's music store. In well under three years of the launching of its 4th version, consumers had purchased over 1 billion songs at 99cents a piece. Considering, I think its safe to say that music works better in the long tail than newspaper articles.

Sure, newspapers certainly have valuable content in their archives and feature articles such as travel and food and wine could very well be able to be sold for a price. But then again, maybe that's a dead idea too.

If you want a new recipe, who are you going to turn to; a journalist at a big paper who got thrown on the restaurant beat or an online group of people with similar tastes as yours who interact with one another on a frequent basis to let each other know where the best bites are?

If you want to go mountainbiking in Colorado, do you scan the archives of your national paper for that one article printed three years ago or do you visit Steve Outing's online group of mountainbiking enthusiasts to share ideas and discover the best trails? 

In an online world where anyone can publish, niche is not a newspapers forté. 

Still, two reviews of Anderson's book in two of the English speaking world's most revered weekly publications note the holes in the long tail theory, offering some support for newspapers in the new economy. The New Yorker declares that due to the enormous amounts of information online and human nature's tendency to "follow the herd," hits could be even more prevalent online as "befuddled consumers congregate around the same thing." The Economist argues that "most hits start in the long tail and move up; so as content in the tail becomes easier to discover, the hits that emerge from it should also be of higher quality." 

This is reflected in newspapers on the Web. Long-established, brand name, general-topic newspapers are still flocked to by the herd, making them the top news sites on the web. Even popular news aggregators are simply a collection of stories from the most well known traditional news organizations. So when a story breaks, readers will tend to read it from their favorite traditional source on which they depend for assured quality.

But this still leaves us at zero when it comes to revenues from consumers since most of those articles are read for free.

If the long tail doesn't work and standard subscriptions don't work, what are newspapers to do?

Sources: The New Yorker, The Economist