A funny thing happened while checking this site's web stats from New York's JFK airport using my Sprint PCS Connection Card. I discovered new referring source of traffic coming from a page on startribune.com. Minnesota's largest daily published an article titled "Web Search: Gadgets and Gizmos" that looks at four web sites that "gleefully provide details" and reactions to last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

We're honored to receive the coverage, and enjoy seeing our less than two month old site featured alongside CNET, Yahoo News, and the official CES web site. But more importantly, we applaud the Star Tribune for covering the online coverage of an event that digs deeper than one local paper could possibly justify.

Long Tail News Reporting and Analysis

This type of long tail news reporting shows the synergistic relationship that exists between traditional news sources and highly specific online news sites, including blogs. Rather than competing with each other for news stories, various media formats can complement each other by referring readers back and forth to relevant content. If each form of media plays to its strengths, everybody wins. We won't try to cover everything that may appear in a traditional newspaper, and we won't expect them to cover stories we find interesting to the depth we crave.

While the Star Tribune provided interesting long-tail links to continuing CES coverage, they missed the long-tail point of the Technology Evangelist story profiled in their column. The column claimed that I had a "less-than-impressed reaction to Google's new paid-video service," in my post titled, "Google Video: Sorry CBS, It's all About the Platform," which is exactly the opposite of what that post tried to convey. Google Video will be huge for the same reason the Star Tribune links to blogs: community journalists and community videographers can take stories further than traditional media sources. While CBS creates a ton of video content, that will eventually be dwarfed by what non-traditional video sources will generate and eventually monetize on Google Video.

Newspapers cannot and should not cover stories in the same depth as blogs. There simply is not enough room, and the depth of coverage would be irrelevant to the majority of their readers. How should newspapers address this? Start stories with headlines and the high points; provide additional coverage for those looking for a complete story, then link to additional online resources for people who can't get enough of the story.

What do you think?

How do you think the relationship between traditional media and new media will evolve?

Are the blogs and other forms of online news in competition with traditional news sources?

Where do you get your news? Where do you go for in-depth coverage?