Safe travels!

The ‘long tail’ is statistics-speak, which I’d thought had drifted into general usage. If you look at a typical Gaussian curve (AKA ‘bell’ curve, Poisson distribution), you’ll see it trails off at both ends. Those are ‘tails’. The expression means ‘not normal’ — and I guess I‘d been hanging out with too many nerds.

My point was simply that, if, after research, you find yourself wrong about something, you are unlikely to be the only person who got it wrong — and so you have a potential article idea, just not the one you originally intended. Queue the click-bait-ey title of, say, ‘The Surprising Thing About [whatever].

As you have noted, many/most people are too lazy to do any research. At least some are too lazy (or self-centered, or some other issue) to be willing to at least read/listen to why they might be wrong. But there are at least some out there who are not.