On a rainy morning in July 2005, in an auditorium in
downtown Buenos Aires, Guillermo Culell was speaking at
a workshop about the policy and management of information
technologies. Since its launch in March 1996, Culell
had been in charge of Clarín.com, Argentina’s most popular
online news site and the Internet presence of Clarín, the
country’s highest-circulation daily.1 Ten minutes into his
presentation, Culell showed a slide with a figure with a semicircular
shape in the middle that flattened toward the edges.
He polled people in the audience about what they thought
it was. One attendee shouted, “A hat!” Another said, “A bell
curve.” A third declared that it was the well-known image of
the boa that ate the elephant, from The Little Prince. Culell
nodded and showed a slide with the illustration from that
book. He paused, and a smile momentarily lit up his face.
Within a presentation about the online news operation of
an established newspaper, perhaps he smiled because of the
connotation of the small devouring the big. But no doubt
it was also because he knew that the audience would react
with bewilderment when he told them that the illustration
from The Little Prince also represented fairly accurately the
temporal pattern of online news consumption at Clarín.
com during the workweek. He illustrated his claim by showing
the slide reproduced in figure I.1. He then asked, “What
do most people do from nine in the morning until six in the
afternoon, Monday to Friday? They are at work. Our public
is people who get the news at the time and place of work.”2