harvard-business-review

cityfile · 12/11/09 03:22PM

• The New York Times is gearing up to cut another two dozen positions at the newspaper, but that's fewer than NYT execs were anticipating. [NYP]
• Cancellations: MTV has pulled the plug on Alexa Chung's daytime show; and HBO's Flight of the Conchords is finished after two seasons. [THR, Variety]
Diane Sawyer and Chris Cuomo bid goodbye to GMA this morning. [ABC]
• NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker, who will remain in charge of NBC after Comcast takes control, has been signed up to a new three-year contract. [THR]
• Ex-Daily News editor Debby Krenek is Newsday's new editor-in-chief. [E&P]
• Stodgy Harvard Business Review is getting a sexy makeover! [NYT]
• Grim stat du jour: 367 magazines were shuttered in 2009. [Crain's]
• More on Dave Zinczenko, the laziest magazine editor alive. [Gawker, DF]

Harvard Business Review pins The Long Tail on the donkey

Jackson West · 06/27/08 04:20PM

Harvard associate professor Anita Elberse has penned a long article for the Harvard Business Review that used data from Rhapsody and Australian DVD-by-mail distributor Quickflix to demonstrate that rather than the Internet enabling a "long tail" of niche media which publishers should embrace, the blockbuster strategy is still what pays dividends for content producers. In other words, Elberse argues that media is still a hits business, and that the Internet is not necessarily the democratizing force The Long Tail author Chris Anderson says it is. Anderson says that Elberse's analysis isn't wrong, per se, just that they disagree on exactly what the "head" and "tail" mean. Except that Elberse worked with Anderson on researching his book, so one imagines the Wired magazine editor explained it thoroughly. Funny, it's as though two different people analyzing the same data have come to entirely different conclusions about the "truth."