Monday, June 19, 2006

Art Is Not Popular

...according to a graphic found in the text "Reporting for the Media." (by Fred Fendler, John R. Bender, Lucinda Davenport, and Michael W. Drager and published by Oxford University Press). The graphic indicates that the least popular news stories are "Business, Agriculture, Religion, Minor Crimes, State Government, Art, Music, Literature."

To be fair, this information was gleaned from the 7th edition, published in 2001. There is a good chance that Music and Literature are more popular stories to read than Art at the time of this post. And, thanks to the Neo Cons, I'll wager Religion has become more popular than Agriculture... unless we are discussing pork belly markets.

The graphic also indicates that the percentage of readers completing an article drops significantly as the number of paragraphs within a story increases. Five paragraphs maintains a readership of 56%, ten paragraphs maintains a readership of 39%, and twenty-five paragraphs maintains a readership of 28%. With this kind of statistic, it is safe to say that art blogs might have some sustaining power in the long haul provided we keep things short and sweet... unlike many of my previous posts.

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