How the “head” survive in the economics of long tail?

Two comments from the Economist article intrigued me to think: what will be the traditional media’s strategy to survive in the era of participatory media?

First, Rupert Murdoch said,"[the newspaper] have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn't send a letter to the editor any more. She goes online and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers.

Second, “it's not content until it's linked,” said Jeff Jarvis, a former journalist and newspaper consultant, “and bloggers will not link to articles that require logins and subscriptions to be viewed.”

Those ideas are related to the long tail rationale, which argues that the creation and consumption of the large continuum of niche content can become a successful business model in the new media environment. As seen on the graph that shows “links from blogs to sites”, the mainstream media as the “head” in an economics of long tail still much needed as the source of information especially with its expertise in terms of gathering and packaging the news. I think the “head” have a chance to success only if it finds a good way to connect with the long tail or even become origin of the long tail.

Another thought I have is that the long tail argument may solve the mystery that we saw from the readership data Dr. Chyi presented in class. Why would Yahoo become such a hot place to get news? Maybe because the portal sites offer so much things to do, which create a long tail of audience with diverse reasons to be there. And this long tail happens to contribute to the news viewing for the site. However, the news viewing may just be a by product of something more fun to do.