The best sentence I read today

Stealing a convention from my favorite Econoblogger, Tyler Cowen, here's the line that made me nod most vigorously today:

"There are those who would argue that in a society that seems to have no general interest (other than, say, Paris Hilton and the Super Bowl) there is no room or need for a general interest magazine."

--NYT article by David Carr about the redesigned Time Magazine, "a thin weekly on increasingly thin paper".

Comments

[Kent Larsen]

Hmmm,

If this is true, than exactly what are the common elements that hold us together as a society? Surely it isn't the Superbowl and Paris Hilton??!!

I suspect that there are a lot of elements that our society holds in common. Perhaps they aren't news or perhaps we as a society are so distracted by the novelty of diversity that the general interest has lost fashion.

My guess is that the pendulum will swing back, and we will eventually arrive at a better balance between the diverse and the general.

After all, no one has posited that this interest in the long tail means that the fat end of the spectrum is without value, or will loose its dominance.

In my view the long tail is about rebalancing -- shifting from over-reliance on the fat end towards they long tail. The fat end will continue to exist, it will just be a bit less fat.

[chrisco]

Kind of a long-winded and awkward way of saying something simple, which is that the Jerry Springerization of America is almost complete. Eventually we’ll all be undereducated, overweighted, fear-driven, single-issue-voting religious nut jobs who get their reality spoonfed to them by some glowing screen or another. As Bon Jovi says, “We’re half way there.”

-chrisco
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[Francis Hwang]

And another thought: How non-general interest is the New York Times itself?

[Rik]

Yeah. But what if 'general interest' is an interest niche, just like 'sciene fiction comics' or 'roman history'? Then there sure would be a long tail-ish demand for a mag or so that handles a lot of different issues without too much detail. I for sure know some people who like that kind of information.

[Patrick Aievoli]

Given the fact that Time's Person of the Year was "us" or "you" it would lead one to believe that there is no desire for "general interest". Everything today is specific. Users will aggregate their interests into one "specific interest magazine". Their own home page. This is what we are doing for the college market. We are making a Netvibes for the college market. Considering it produces an annual spending budget of over $175 Billion a year we thought it was ripe. Given the demographics adoption of the Web we feel it is the generation of the Internet. Check us out when you get the chance. http://www.theCampusCenter.com. PS Have total respect for your work and have been a fan since the beginning. Good luck and keep going.
Patrick

[Stephi]

Can we really say that in society we dont have general interest?

[perfectlyGoodInk]

Society wants me to be interested in Paris Hilton? I guess I must have misplaced the memo.

Oh wait, I recently got disc one of Veronica Mars Season One from Netflix, and whoa, Paris had an appearance. So I guess that was the memo. She didn't do a very good job, though.

[Aukcje]

Thanks for this very good article ... I must insert this on my site in Poland ... Thanks