Papers already in the long tail

John Burke says the "long tail" won't work for newspapers:

"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 [link added] of mountainbiking enthusiasts to share ideas and discover the best trails?

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

I agree with Burke that newspapers as traditionally organized struggle to develop and compete with niche information products, online or otherwise. They aren't in our DNA.

But we still have the power to evolve. Neither inertia nor our early struggles to adapt make good reasons to dismiss long tail opportunities.

Almost any U.S. newspaper puts a local lens on its content. That means it already lives in its own long tail of general information sites. We should be used to that. Burke makes all newspapers sound like national newspapers -- and sure, any niche products USA Today or The Wall Street Journal develop must compete against national-scale verticals.

But when you apply that local filter plus a niche filter (what I have called "local-plus-one," though I know that sounds like some kind of add-on phone service :-) ) to product development, the competitive landscape looks very different.

In any category of traditional newspapering -- local news, sports, business, events, jobs, cars, homes, retail, services -- niche opportunities remain for the picking specifically because individual local newspapers do not have to compete on a national scale. Those niches live in two long tails: they're local, and they're narrow verticals.

We do have to get over the fact that success in a narrow niche in a local market still doesn't bring in the scale of money we have become addicted to from the core business. It may take dozens of little businesses, and lots of organizational adaptation, to approach the business scale of our old gravy train.

I'd rather the industry exhaust itself trying to find the right little opportunities than sit back as we collectively shrug and wither away trying to find one big cure.