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

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

My dear friends at D/Park Cities People are branching out -- a good indicator that there is a hunger for really local news and information. In the status-quo world, this is a great strategy. I wonder, though, how long weekly will be good enough. And, although they've carved out the most affluent parts in town, there are a lot more than eight neighborhoods in Dallas.

Why monopolies suck, reason #3,784

Bloglines

Volume I, Number 1

Welcome to the middle of the beginning of the revolution.

So much has gone on already, we'll have to catch you up as we go. But, the story so far:

I'm a media junkie, and not just because I run a division of a media company. Over the past five years, I've become more and more disgusted with the state of local media in general and my local newspaper in particular. A few months ago, I started asking "what if" a lot more, and wondering if the model wasn't so broken that it was beyond internal repair.

I spent a lot of time researching, and my instincts were confirmed: local media in general, and local newspapers in particular, were on a long, slow march to oblivion.

In the course of my research, I found strong creative voices that inspired me, urged me to think different(ly). I looked at the colleagues I most admired, and saw that I admired them because they were creating new businesses and new ways of looking at old problems. I heard industry stalwarts saying the same crazy things that I was thinking.

I took a week off from work and started writing a plan for a media company that would reinvent the way people exchanged information. I've written business plans before, but this was different. In the past, my plans were operational -- how I would take an existing market and model and make hey. This new plan, however, was about breaking the model, or perhaps ignoring it. Today, I read a quote (was on Gapingvoid, but link is gone) that summed up the thinking:

It’s easier to invent a Wal-Mart from the ground up...than to get Sears to reinvent itself.

Exactly.

About this time, "Sears" {read Belo and the other newspapers facing circulation scandals} stabbed itself in the foot. Actually, they did it a long time ago, but they got caught recently. In fact, during that week I took off.

This was a double-edged blessing. On the one hand, it made my work-in-progress business plan, particularly the part in which circulation had nothing to do with ad pricing, seem that much smarter. On another, it made my launch that much more timely. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

So, I've knocked on some doors. "I" am now "us." Two of the smartest people I know have jumped on my crazy train. One has the broadcast experience that I lack; the other is an attorney (always useful) and an avid consumer of news. About a dozen different people are reviewing the plan and helping me find the holes and the additional upsides.

I'll post the executive summary presently, as soon as I think it's ready for prime time. In the meantime, answers to a few obvious questions:

• No, I didn't make all this up after the Dallas Morning News reported its ginned-up circ numbers.
• No, I'm not trying to put the DMN out of business. I don't want that responsibility. They'll do or not do that without our help. However, I do believe that Dallas and a lot of other markets need another voice; and I think that voice should be medium-indifferent. (A theorem: Every city should have as many daily papers as it has commercial airports within an hour's drive.) My plan is not to take 90% of the Dallas news market -- it's to take 25% of twenty markets.
• I still have a day job, and as long as I do, this site will be anonymous. Don't be a jerk and post my name in the comments, or I'll shut them off. That would suck, as it violates one of our primary tenets: Media is a conversation, not a monologue.

More to come. I'm going to use this as a diary of the evolving concepts and of the launch process. I hope you'll join the conversation.