Mindy McAdams quotes Chris Anderson on the impressive number of links to the New York Times in Technorati vs. all of the other links combined and then makes this observation:

What’s really cool about the whole concept of “the long tail” is that it matches what a lot of critics of news Web sites have long observed: All the attention and time lavished on the home page is kind of pointless, because the way you really attract traffic and page views is through search. And search requires you to lavish attention on the back end, the structure of stories and individual pieces of the site — the meat and potatoes, instead of merely the menu.

Sites that don’t have integrated search, haven’t optimized the entire site for search engines, don’t see every page as a gateway — they are kind of blowing it.

Also, archives should be free and registration should not be an impenetrable wall, but porous and flexible.

Of course, local is still important, but these changes enhance efforts to draw and retain local users, too.

UPDATE: Only just now did I actually read Chris’ original post. Every card
carrying member of the MSM who thinks “without us, blogs are nothing,” should
read the post. Anderson has that stats to prove
that if every MSM outlet shut down tomorrow, the blogosphere would go
on just fine. The political blogosphere, which I suspect is just
about the only blogs anybody in the MSM reads, might be hit hard, but the
blogosphere is huge — a very long tail, indeed.