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

Now, a word from Mark Twain

The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so, the expert isn’t prepared for him;he does the thing he ought not to do and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

I know it's true in poker. I suspect it's true in business.

Holding off the inevitable onslaught

Not to beat a dead horse, but I'm still amazed by people who don't have functional RSS feeds. I just realized this morning that I almost never read Romanesko anymore. The only reason is that I read everything through Bloglines now, and he doesn't have a feed. The daily emails pile up in my "to read" box, and I never read 'em.

The point here isn't RSS, but the fact that the number of mediums is exploding, and at an insanely low cost threshold-- You always have to be adding to the arsenal.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in Peg-land?

I've had several chats in the past couple days about the incumbents' ability to take on our tactics to beat us. A good example of that phenomenon is the quick Quick launch that crushed the AM Journal Express.

Yesterday I showed a supersmart newspaper industry guru what we plan to do. I asked him how long it would take the DMN (or any other incumbent), from the point they decided to copy our tactics, to the day they could pull it off. (He had just brought up Quick as a cautionary tale.)

"Please say three months," I prayed. "C'mon, gimme 90 freakin' days."

He paused thoughtfully, grimaced slightly, then grinned and looked me straight in the eye.

"One year."

That was the greatest endorsement we've gotten so far-- because, as I discussed with another newsie last night, by the time they get there, we'll already be on to the next medium, while still delivering all the "old" stuff.

Who had heard of or cared about RSS a year ago? Who knew what a blog was three years ago? Any content creator can have both now, for free or close to it.

The Times, they're a changin...

Weekend roundup

Not much time for blogging this weekend, so here's one of those hodgepodge posts to tide you:

• Jeff Jarvis visited a class at Harvard and found validation of our Daily Show theory of news delivery.
• Seth Godin gives corporations advice on what makes blogs work. I'd argue that the news media should embrace these as well: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness, Controversy and Utility.
• Evelyn Rodriguez has two intriguing posts right now: The first is a good overview of the blogosphere debate on whether branding is dead or on life support. The second, illustrates one of our key differentiators from legacy media. By nature, our ad model is much more participatory:

  Here's a challenge for any company to try out. Pretend you have no advertising budget - zilch - how would you engage with your potential and existing customers then? If you cannot answer that question, advertising won't save you.

  Many of our advertisers have limited resources or don't currently advertise, because their 1/68 page ad can't really drive them any business.
• One of my partners, who we'll call "Nancye," (since that's her name) often gets wound up on a schpeal about how the convergence of our various distribution models will position us to command a huge mind (and advertising) share across multiple platforms. I usual respond with something along the lines of "Yeah, but we've got to get launched first." Then, I read something like this and feel both shortsighted and visionary at the same time:

  Eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.

• A bunch of people continue to get in a wad about Google stealing their content and advertisers. Quit bitching and evolve, already. (Our new friend, Vin, gets a mention.)
• Doug McGill guests over at PressThink with an essay on why journalists' "Grand Old Professional Code" is falling to pieces and why that may not be a bad thing. Daily Peg's inaugural must-read of the week.

Friday FRI follow-up

Returning to my earlier post on the Ferguson Road Initiative: Here's the bid presented to the DOJ: Download fri_2points_2004_or.pdf

Lots of interesting stuff there, if you live in that area or think your neighborhood could use a similar grant. A hyperlocal news organization could/would easily provide such supporting files for its news.

A transparency trap?

In looking up the Wasserman quote below, I realized that I'd missed his last couple missives. (Note: no one should publish so much as a grocery list these days without an RSS feed attached.)

Ed disagrees with us on the transparency inherent in Journalism 2.0:

First, what exactly do you disclose? Fine, readers should know if a reporter covering an electoral campaign is a fierce partisan. But the situation is rarely that clear-cut (since assigning editors aren’t usually that ethically obtuse.)...

Hence, the second problem: What do you cop to? A lifelong mistrust of authority? Abiding sympathy for underdogs? Admiration for entrepreneurs? Many readers find religious faith relevant. Should you acknowledge having doubted the existence of a just and benevolent God as a cautionary note alongside your story about litigation over a comatose child? Might a bitter divorce influence your coverage of lawyers and courts?...

Third, why confine disclosure to the person who wrote the story or appears on camera? Journalism is a team effort. So we get this reporter’s disclosure for an abortion-related story: “I’m a gay man, and have no personal involvement, although my unmarried sister just had an abortion. But my editor is strongly pro-choice, and the headline writer is a born-again. The publisher is a practicing Catholic with seven children, and reads everything we run on the subject….”...

Besides, what’s the point of all this voir dire? Shouldn’t the proof of good or bad reporting be the report itself, especially compared with others? If a story is skewed, buries some facts and makes corrupt use of others for polemical reasons, won’t that emerge from analysis and criticism, not from some half-baked critique of the people who produced it?

While he makes some reasonable logical arguments here, the point missed is this: To serve your customer, you want to give him a read that he doesn't have to do a lot of research for secondary and analysis and criticism to find out that you're full of beans. Those who create transparency will be better-read.

Further, the silliness of the many disclaimers, which is a valid concern, is largely prevented when your reporters are allowed voice and personality in their work. Yes, a six graf disclaimer at the end of a straight news story is silly, but when you let a good reporter tell the story in his own voice, the biases are a clear part of the reporting.

Don't disclaim, in other words. Speak in a real voice.

Newspapers are dead! Long live newspapers!

There's a real paradox in the decline of the daily newspaper. On the one hand, it's clear that consumers are in the driver's seat as to how they're going to get their information, and as "Generation C"(ontent) coming of age, the digital tipping point is nigh.

But, in the words of Ed Wasserman:

There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.

Exhibit: Baseball fan's scramble to get copies of papers declaring the Sox' World Championship. They aren't selling screenshots on Ebay.

Broad and deep

There's been lots of ink n' ether spilled over the fact that the tabloid format is gaining preference over the broadsheet. Unfortunately, a lot of folks don't understand that the preference is over the physical format as opposed to the content, and use tabs as an excuse to run only short blurbs on national news. (See the defunct AM Journal Express.)

Murdoch's The Times of London has been publishing in both formats, and as of Monday, the tabloid has won.

Incidentally, I was picking up dinner at the Dixie House the other night and a woman reading the DMN was singing the praises of the new "At a Glance" section. She was the first person I'd heard say anything good about it, so I asked her why she liked it.

(Paraphrased):

"Because I can hold it horizontal like this. I hate that there are only blurbs here, but it's just easier to hold. If the rest of the paper was like this, I'd actually read the whole thing."

Have I mentioned that we plan to publish our print edition as a tab?

God Bless Al Neuharth

I may personally dislike the McNewspaper feel of USA Today, but they're doing lots right, including getting folks to read who wouldn't otherwise be doing so.

Neuharth gets the endorsement thing right, too:

If decision-makers at newspapers quit trying to be kingmakers, they and their readers would benefit.

My last words on the Belo layoffs

Media companies should cover the hell out of the things they can bring unique insight to and lead their readers to other, better sources for the rest. (Heresy, for an old-media type, I know.) So, after this note I'm ceding all further comment to Eric Celeste and to the Frontburner crew, and going back to our stuff. (Eric has also become a clearinghouse for journo job openings for the newly displaced.)

I think this correspondent on the Frontburner may have been right. You have to go pretty far back in the A section of today's paper to find a byline that isn't wire or Washington bureau. Lots of wire on the Overnight page, too. Personal Technology Thursday is gone, as of next week. Probably the right call, as the section certainly wasn't locally-driven content, but I'll personally miss it.

At his day job, Eric notes some other DMN changes (and reversed changes) in the offing.

Kudos to Eric and Adam for (mostly) refusing to name names. It's their perogative. Brickbats to the DMN for failing to cover the story in their own pages. They run a front-Business section story and photo every time someone higher-ranking than receptionist gets promoted, you'd think they'd cover the layoff. (I know it was mentioned in earlier stories, but nothing today.)

And Gary West? Three days before the Breeders Cup? Unbelievable.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

UPDATE: A reader points out that there was actually a small blurb on page 10 of the Business section. Bully bully.

Our future customers

A new Gallup poll on teen behaviors says that "yesterday":

60% used the web.
28% read a newspaper.