The Daily Peg: Pegasus News, Inc. Founder's Blog

A smoking gun?

A late notice on this one, since the Peg blog has only been running since the weekend:

Eric Celeste has the best (only?) investigative reporting on the DMN circulation "overstatement." In this week's Dallas Observer, he reveals:

After he [a distribution contractor] left, Johnson's wife made one last effort to alert the paper to circulation wrongdoing. She e-mailed a member of the Belo board and told him about the circulation scandal. They traded e-mails as he asked for more details. In 2001, the ABC conducted a major surprise audit of the paper, Johnson says his friends told him. "I told my wife, 'Looks like someone listened.'

Good stuff. I don't know why they're burying it in the "Buzz" column, though.

What you missed in today's DMN

Day two, and already breaking format -- hard to pick on DMN headlines today, because there are so few local ones. Instead, a quick analysis of how resources were deployed yesterday to produce today's old news (wire/syndicated stories not counted; sports section not analyzed):

NY bylines (DMN-ers in NYC)	12
Other non-local bylines	12
Total non-local story bylines	24
Local story bylines	18

Also note that while we have a report from the "Europe bureau," the Texas news comes from the wire. Not one of the non-local stories delivers anything substantive that can't be gotten elsewhere.

Maybe it's the Dall Morning News, or just the Llas Morning News.

Just like the citizen who gripes that the cop could have been stopping the robbery at the nice Greek restaurant on Main Street if he hadn't been busy writing a jaywalking ticket to my employee walking to work, we think that today's local media outlet should expend 95% of its resources on local news. Sure, folks want to know what's happening in the world, but they can usually get that from the wire. Meantime, who's covering the world that most folks see every day?

Keeping up with the Times

Think the media world isn't ripe for a change? Consider this "future is now" reference from today's WSJ.

This technological/social merry-go-round isn't about to stop anytime soon. Consider the following six tech stories, all of which were reported last week, and ask yourself how many of them would have seemed like science fiction just a couple of years ago:

A major TV network faces anger from owners of high-end HDTV sets that its sports coverage, while impressive, is a day old. Japanese officials investigate recording companies on suspicion that they're blocking rivals from offering ringtones to cellphone users. A cable-TV provider begins a trial of videophones for 140,000 subscribers. Two telecom giants ink a deal giving their customers access to each other's Wi-Fi hot spots. Protesters headed for a political convention get daily cellphone text messages telling them where to go. U.S. law-enforcement officials raid a ring of suspected pirates who made 45 terabytes of copyrighted material -- four times as much data as in the Library of Congress's print collection -- available for download over a peer-to-peer network.

Now ask yourself: How much has your local newspaper really changed in the past five years?

Coming attractions

To be fair, I don't know Guy Kerr, or anything about him. He's likely a prince of a fellow. But depending on how the ongoing circulation questions at the DMN are resolved, this has the potential to be an event that could raise a few eyebrows:

10/14/04 - Fourth Annual Robert H. Dedman Award for Ethics & Law
               Bent Tree Country Club
               Honoree: Guy Kerr, Sr. Vice President/Law and Government & Secretary,
               Belo Corp.

The core principles

·        Local news and information is aggressively, inherently, totally local.

·        Users have so many choices of medium, that we cannot afford not to distribute content through as many media as technologically possible.

·        Media is a conversation, not a monologue.

·        Engaged consumers are better than paying consumers.

·    All products and services are as precise and precisely priced as technology will allow.

The need (Part I)

The news is Swift

John Podhoretz at the NY Post uses the Swift Boat Veterans ad brouhaha as an example of how the internet has fundamentally changed media. It was a story largely ignored by the mainstream press until the roar of the blogosphere and talk radio made it news. Whatever you think of the ads, that's not the point:

I've been listening to mainstream-media types talk about the terrible threat posed to the news business by one new phenomenon or other since I began my career 22 years ago. The complaint is invariably, and drearily, the same: Whatever is new is bad because it supposedly lowers the historically high standards of the mainstream media.

The last two years in particular have seen the explosion of a new medium — the personal Internet newspaper, or blog — that has already and will forever change the way people get their information.

This is a thrilling development — unless you are a mainstream-media Big Fish...

This democratization of the news is clearly a good thing, if only because it increases available sources of information in a democracy.

But it isn't a good thing if you're a proud part of an Establishment whose authority is being eroded and whose control of the marketplace is being successfully challenged.

What these Establishment-media types will never do — what they can never do — is consider the possibility that the 24-hour news cycle and the rise of talk radio and the Internet are all positive developments...

They hate the Swift-boat story. Hate it with a passion. Some of it's based in genuine conviction. Some of it's patently ideological. And some of it's based in fear. They are worried the bell is beginning to toll for them, and they're right.

Amazon

What you missed in today's DMN

This is the first in a series of posts that will become a regular Pegasus News feature: For intrepid users who fear that they are somehow missing something by abandoning the Dallas Morning Snooze, we'll provide a daily summary of the high points gleaned from their locally generated content.

Part of what we think local news has wrong is that they spend a tremendous amount of their resources on national/international news and/or general nonlocal features. Those resources could and should be dedicated to local news. The irony is that the local reporter covering the nonlocal item usually isn't in as good a position to provide meaningful coverage and insight as someone who covers that beat every single day.

Each day, we'll provide a list of the stories that shouldn't have been, and (where applicable) a link to a better outside resource.

Without further ado, the first edition of "What you missed in today's DMN":

1. Dubya has friends at energy companies.
   Bet they held the presses for that one.
2. There have been protests at the RNC.
   I won't beat this dead horse for long-- but what, exactly, do the DMN reporters bring to the table that the NYT folk don't? And two reporters, no less? Put one on the mayor and one on the city manager.
3. You can buy insurance for lots of things.
   How about obsolescence?
4. Stress effects the body.
   A fine story, but you could get this from any number of medical sites.
5. The National Enquirer, which has been around for about twenty years, has had an impact on newspapers. Its longtime editor has written a book.
   Nothing in the story that you can't get from the Amazon review.
   

DFW Blogs