Newspaper archives and the Long Tail

Posted by Martin Stabe on 11 July 2006 at 14:22
Tags: Journalism

Roy Greenslade’s excellent blog notices a report by a group of physicists at Notre Dame University in the United States and colleagues in Hungary, who provided evidence for the that stories on news web sites generate nearly all of their traffic within 36 hours of being posted.

Surely that’s the study that was first reported more than a year ago when it was first published, right? So much for the 36-hour theory of old news!

Since the study was conducted, of course, the “Digg effect” has started creating some
spectacular exceptions to the general rule. Recently, an archived Telegraph story about global warming from 2004 archived rose to the top of the social news aggregator Digg and quickly became one of the most popular stories on the Telegraph’s web site.

Usually, though, the distribution of accesses over time in archives are online journalism’s example of Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” effect: A small number of recently-posted stories provide the overwhelming bulk of traffic (and thus advertising revenue) to a news web site at any given moment, but the small number of accesses to the many individual stories in a archive add up to significant traffic.

This is probably what Nikesh Arora of Google had in mind when he said a few months ago that newspapers could make better use of their archives online.
“There is a hidden gold mine in the archives, and newspapers need to intelligently link their archives to their online presence,” Arora said.

In part because of this, Press Gazette is currently working on extending our online archive back several years. We discovered that an existing in-house database of stories dating back to 1994 were saved in a format that could be imported onto our web server.

Tags: Journalism