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

More reasons to hurry

I've said before that I feel like we need to move quickly to launch -- our concept feels so on target, so of the moment; but the window will only be open so long before it becomes conventional wisdom.

That said, on days like today I feel an even greater sense of urgency: Sinking, chair-slinging, brawling Rangers hurl a chair and break a fan's nose; a rumble at the WH School Board meeting; an ongoing Amber alert drama; embezzling at DART (a story I could have broken six months ago); .

What a great day to be in the news business in Dallas.

Reynolds lilek PJ post

Cox & Forkum on Rather

Third-party validation

I'm starting to feel like the whole media world is reading this (as opposed to the hundred or so of you who actually are). A wave of news/commentary today supportive of our core concepts, mostly culled from the must-read I Want Media:

• Elizabeth Guider of Variety reports the passing of the torch (more of a wresting of the torch) from old media (like DMN; 60 Minutes, etc) to new media (The Daily Show; Fox News; Pegasus News).
• Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, sees network news on the wane.
• I never thought I'd be counting him as an ally, but scrape away the partisan polemic and there's lots of good stuff on the death of old media in this Rush Limbaugh transcript: "The new media -- and I know, because I was there. I was present at the Creation with a capital C -- has been a boon for those who care about debate within the arena of ideas. The new media has been a boon for alternative points of view. The new media has been a boon for the truth, ladies and gentlemen."
• The LA Times reports on the rise of bloggers and their peak with last week's Ra^thergate. My answer to the hand-wringing professor who
  
  worries about being able to trust the anonymous writers of blogs as sources? Maybe real journalists should act more like bloggers.
• Newsflash: Blogs don't make money. Of course not. They're not businesses. They don't have marketing; technology; resources, etc. But if someone ran a coherent business operation that employed open source journalism, the blogger/journalists would make money.
• Newsday reports on details of its own circ scandal. Fascinating in terms of the machinations -- fake hawkers selling to fake customers. So unneccesary if you follow our model (circ has no bearing on ad prices-- it's pay for performance).

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UPDATE: We're starting to sound less ahead of the curve and more in the middle of it.

Tim Porter has an experiential analysis of (one reason) why newspaper managers are finding a need to cook the books.

The Plan: Overview

Alt hedline: What is all this stuff about?

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Pegasus News is a local media company that reinvents the broken business and content model of local news. It is a multi-product entity that will create a nimble, scalable model for the gathering and distribution of news and information within any major local market. We intend to launch in Dallas, Texas in late 2005 to prove and refine the concept and then to leverage proprietary business and technology models to expand into twenty key top-50 U.S. markets that have only one daily consumer newspaper.

 

We are launching an integrated news and information distribution chain that starts with a deep, robust, hyper-local news and information website. That site’s content will also be distributed via personalized emails; cell phone text messages; a daily print newspaper; radio; television; and other media that develop over time.

 

Our strategy is based on the following basic principles:

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

·        Users have so many choices of medium, that we cannot afford 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.

 

At launch, our Dallas products will include:

·        A robust local news and information website that carries all of our content. Pieces of that content will then be redistributed through:

o       Individually customized e-newsletters

o       A print newspaper

o       Wireless text messaging

o       A radio presence (initially a show on a local news/talk station)

o       A TV presence (initially a weekly show on a local TV station)

 

[Financial estimates redacted]

Comical

Anybody remember back, like a couple months ago when the DMN had its big cartoon vote-a-rama, thinning the herd to tighten up the Texas Living section? Remember the whole trade-off was that we were going to get the most popular toons in color? (Of course, we couldn't insert some editorial judgment about which toons would benefit artistically from color. No, we paint by numbers!)

That sure didn't last long. By my unscientific count, at least half the time (including today), they're running B&W.

Like I said, no respect.

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UPDATE: Even worse, The Norm ceases publication tomorrow. Bad day for a 'toon fan.

Open source news

I've resolved to leave the Ra^thergate dead horse alone and focus on bidness-- you can follow the

blow-for-blow on Instapundit.

But in my reading there, I was led to a commentary by Hugh Hewitt that got me focused in on a term that I must have heard before, although it felt new:

"Open source journalism"

"Open source" intelligence is the new and increasingly dominant practice in the world of intelligence, just as "open source" software is rising in that field.  "Open source" journalism should be the new rule for scribblers as well.  The reporters at even these big papers, and the television producers simply don't have the skills sets on display yesterday among the blogs, and it comes back to the same issues and talents that made the internet journalists superior in researching the Christmas in Cambodia story.

Exactly how we plan to operate. This replaces my "bloggers with spelling" phraseology in the business plan.

An alternate business plan?

Should be no surprise that I love old movies about media. Last night we watched a Peter Sellers murder farce, The Naked Truth. The sleazy tabloid publisher character had an unbeatable business plan:

Pay me in a fortnight, or I publish in a month.

He was the one they all wanted to kill.

Our job just got slightly easier

While issuing platitudinous staff memos today, Belo reportedly cut twenty-three open editorial positions-- I also hear that as many as eight of those were in Metro.

Go local, young man.

"60 Minutes" Bush docs open floodgates

The apparently-faked Bush service documents shown on 60 Minutes and debunked by bloggers have opened a floodgate of third-party validation of our business plan. Some highlights:

My favorite, from James Lileks (emphasis mine):

Blogs haven’t toppled old media. The foundations of Old Media were rotten already. The new media came along at the right time. Put it this way: you’ve see films of old buildings detonated by precision demolitionists. First you see the puffs of smoke – then the building just hangs there for a second, even though every column that held it up has been severed. We’ve been living in that second for years, waiting for the next frame. Well, here it is. Roll tape. Down she goes. And when the dust settles we will be right back where we were 100 years ago, with dozens of fiercely competitive media outlets throwing elbows to earn your pennies ... And so the Internet had it for lunch, because the Internet does not have to schedule 17 meetings to develop a strategy for impactfully maximizing brand leverage in emerging markets; the Internet does not have to worry about how a decision will affect one’s management trajectory; the Internet smells blood and leaps, and that has turned the game around, for better or worse. So we’re back to where we were in 1904 – except that the guys on the corner shouting WUXTRY, WUXTRY aren’t grimy urchins selling the paper – they’re the people who wrote the damn thing, too.

I repeat my earlier obvious advice to middle-market newspapers: go local.

Podhoretz: A good overview of the situation.

Glenn Reynolds points out that the Chicago Sun-Times treats bloggers like any other legitimate news source. This may be a first.

How bloggers made the story at TCS:

"The more basic question is how could a rabble of bloggers, in one day, provide hard core proof of forgery when major news organizations took those documents at face value?"

Now here's where I think we've got something. Right now blogs are being painted as the noble Davids to the bumbling old media Goliaths. It's just a matter of time before the first big news blog hoax starts reminding people that the majority of bloggers are hacks with broadband and too much time on their hands.

That's where we come in. The immediacy of a blog, with the spelling, punctuation and factchecking that real journalists (should) bring to the table.

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UPDATE: Seems like the Office helper paperclip spoof has become the art form d'jour. Here's another.