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

A Bronx cheer for Raspberry

After Andy Rooney, my least favorite media curmudgeon is the WaPo's William Raspberry. Today, he rants about the web's ill-effect on journalism (reg. req.) and manages to contradict himself several times along the way.

Somehow he equates Gennifer Flowers with the Swift Boat Veterans. And he's afraid of the power that the web can wield:

Much the same thing happened a few weeks ago when The Post, driven by persistent postings on the Web, sought to debunk a story to the effect that no airliner crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11 -- that the damage was done by an American-launched missile.

If more or less ordinary citizens -- "netizens" -- could drive the CIA-crack story or the Sept. 11 fantasy into the mainstream press, imagine what a well-financed, politically motivated, smartly directed campaign could do. That, essentially, is what happened with the Swift Boat Veterans group.

But maybe it's not so bad after all:

Indeed, for me the most important complaint about mainstream coverage of the Swift boat affair was not that the mainstream press ignored it, but that mainstream journalists waited too long to get beyond the they-said-he-said "objective" reporting and try to figure out who was closer to the truth.

No, no-- it really is:

The explosion of the Internet leaves us, in effect, with no gatekeeper. Sometimes important information gains currency that way. The problem is that anyone with Web access can run any cockamamie story up the flagpole -- and if enough people salute, prompt the mainstream press to deploy its resources.

It's that bad -- and it isn't likely to get better any time soon.

I'd like to write an eloquent refutation of his argument, citing the natural market democratization inherent in the new technological paradigm, et al. But I imagine he's like that sales rep of mine that claims Excel documents disappear into the ether when she gets gibberish by trying to open them in Acrobat. The absence of the word "blog" in the story is telling.

(I will make this point though: Just as the rabble of the webworld can bring a faux scandal to prominence, it also kills the fakes very quickly. Ask Dan Rather.)

Suffice to say that he's one of those holier than thou old-schoolers who will be first against the wall when The Revolution comes.

Foxes investigate henhouse, report "All well"

The NYT looks at what major newspaper chains are doing to better police themselves in the wake of recent circulation scandals, as well as reaction from the investment community.

Paul Ginochio, a senior publishing analyst at Deutsche Bank, said he felt reassured not only by the new rules that papers are instituting, but also because the number of papers that have acknowledged circulation fraud has remained at four.

"If I'm a chief executive of a public newspaper company, my window of opportunity to announce a circulation scandal has pretty much closed," he said. "It now looks like it was just a few bad apples."

Seems pretty naive to me. Sounds like he's selling short on the power of that great Egyptian waterway.

Especially in light of remarks like this (emphasis mine):

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is owned by Pulitzer Inc., has made a more concerted effort to ask the audit bureau for preapproval for its circulation promotion programs. That way it can ensure that a program in which a third party, like an advertiser, pays for a stack of papers is in compliance with audit bureau regulations.

Stephen Helm, vice president and director of circulation for The Post-Dispatch, said that the paper had made adjustments in some of those programs, but declined to detail what those programs were.

"I was comfortable with what we did before, and I am after," he said of the paper's efforts at compliance. "That doesn't mean I'm not spending more time looking."

Fortunately (for us) none of the programs involve abandoning the goofy metric of circulation as the driver of ad rates.

The journo labor market

Some numbers in this piece on the Belo layoffs/circ scandal that don't add up for me:

The overall reduction in workforce will be completed this month and save Belo about $2.6 million in compensation and benefits during the remainder of 2004, executives said during a conference call to discuss the company's third-quarter results.

OK, so they save $2.6 million on 350 people over the fourth quarter. Figure that around 22% of that is benefits. That leaves $2.02 million. Figuring in a generous severance package of 90 days, that would leave an annualized savings of $10.13 million. Split that 350 ways, and you're looking at an average annual salary of $28,943. Seems a little light, even for reporters' pay.

Some actual content

Part of the exhilaration of working on the Pegasus launch is that we've a lot of folks who are just dying to write for us. Below you'll find a sports column from a member of our extended family, whom, due to the fact that he does write for some Journalism 1.0 outlets, I'll keep anonymous until he tells me otherwise.

If any of you other Pegasi feel moved to write something hyper-local, or at least local, feel free to send it in. I've always envisioned that at some point this site would become a hybrid of content for the real company and a blog of the process. Here's the first entry, unedited and spacing unfixed:

Another Goofy partner?

According to PaidContent.org, Disney is reviving Starwave as a brand for mobile content and is seeking to license third-party stuff.

Not worth posting in and of itself, but I like the cartoon, which is excuse enough.

So are we red, or blue?

The Pew Research Center has released a report on the public's reaction to the media's election coverage. Buried in the report is something interesting for us to think about:

Kerry has a modest advantage among voters who mostly rely on network news and [local] newspapers. Voters who get most of their election news from local TV are split, with 46% supporting Kerry and 42% Bush.

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One housekeeping item: For those of you worried about the pegasusnews.com URL: It's been pointed to this site, and according to the tech people at the registrant, it'll just take a couple days to propagate over the 'net. Email address is again functional.

Proof that we have some old-media in us

Not even launched yet, and already we decided that what we really need to make this thing cook is:

A redesign!

Kidding aside, anyone with a lick of sense can see that this site has changed, and much for the better. Jeff Harrell, who found this blog and sent a classic email introduction, has spent much of the past week enduring my fickle technoidiocy and creating the site you see before you. He's also being kind enough to host us, along with his blog, The Shape of Days. Many of you may have seen this post, which was instrumental in proving up the whole RaTHergate thing.

Let us know what you think-- there will be a few irregularities, mostly in older posts created by importing from the lame Blog-City environment into the better, but less gimicky MT. On the whole though, I think the new look underscores that we're the rare new media folks who understand and respect The Old Ways. Or vice versa.

For those who want to subscribe to the feed, it's: http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/pegasus_news/atom.xml

or:

feed:shapeofdays.typepad.com/pegasus_news/index.rdf

The Pegasi

When I first started this blog, my partners thought I was crazy. On the one hand, I shouldn't be out publishing our brilliant proprietary concepts to the whole world, or even the couple hundred folks who now read this site. Beyond that, I shouldn't be wasting my time on what could be construed as a vanity project like a blog when there's real work to be done, right?

I didn't have a retort then, but I do now.

To the first point, the reading/linking/writing that regular blogging enforces has improved the plan exponentially. For that, I thank (among others) Hugh MacLeod, Tim Oren, Wired, PaidContent and Russell at The Mobile Technology Weblog. This week's readers will remember casual references to a couple industry muckety-mucks: Having lunch with one next week; already spoke on the phone and discussed The Manifesto with the other.

To the second, thanks largely to this blog, where there once were three, there are now more than twenty. The resonance of the Journalism 2.0 concept has attracted other bright folks who want to be part of a revolution. They're all working on this at various levels, but all for free. Some are hoping that it becomes a job; others just want to see us make a go of it.

Yeah, there's times (like right now) that another activity might empirically be more productive. But if this brings us another twenty folks like the first twenty, it's well worth it.

For the hyper-interested, below is the text of a missive to the team from last week:

The Times, they're a' changin'

Over at Pressthink, Jay Rosen is struggling to find the coherent theme in all of the change issues that are afoot in media today.

We are in the midst of a sea change, and everyone I talk to seems to see it. Our business plan would have been laughable five years ago. We're betting that in five years it will seem as conventional as blogging does today. (Be honest, had you even heard of blogs two years ago?)

As some of the commenters on Pressthink seem to think, I believe it comes down to two things:

1. As we near the tipping point for online publishing adoption (usage and creation), the information flow is being rapidly democratized. But, nature abhors a vacuum, and the market wants some order to the data flow. (Face it, unlimited information is almost as uselss as no information.) Which brings us to the second point...
2. Like many industries do over time, the traditional media market has passed maturity and entered decline. It is largely coincidental that this has happened just as the technological democratization above bears fruit. That condition has created a perfect storm that has the market practically screaming for a revolution.

At least, that's what I tell myself every morning.

Missed opportunities

When I first started this blog, I had a short-lived gimmick called "What you missed in today's Dallas Morning News." I'd post something snarky about the silliness of the DMN's content that day. I had originally envisioned that as a feature for our print edition, but gave up on it altogether after awhile, because although there was no shortage of material, the joke was always the same:

Irrelevant content. Lack of local coverage.

Today's paper, though, inspired me to dust off the snark-ometer.

Front page story: Some experts say that voters care about local issues and that might effect their votes in the upcoming presidential election.

Stop the presses! Meanwhile the Frost-Sessions debate is relegated to an interior page of Metro.

Then, in the thumbs up/down section of the Editorial pages, we get this gem:

W stands for Whoopee
Good news for Texans and other Red Staters: An ABC News Primetime Live survey found that Republicans are happier with their sex lives than Democrats. Sure, some put-out Dems tried to cold-shower the poll, claiming that the randy right is simply too easily satisfied. Could be, but we're betting that Republican Romeos love the stereotype-smashing pleasure of the phrase, "Are you a conservative, or are you just happy to see me?"

Much has been made about improvements to the DMN editorial page under the regime of Keven Ann Willey, with substantial props also going out to Rod Dreher. I won't deny that I see more diversity of opinion on the page than was there a couple years ago; and they now occasionally take a half-assed stand as opposed to no stand at all. But there's still a dearth of edge and local opinion and there's still far too much over-qualification of every stand taken. I still know that when I talk to knowledgable local media people, they rank the editorial page, metro and the business section as our biggest opportunities to compete.

I don't know Willey and I've only met Dreher once, but I have read their stuff. My perception is that they'll never be able to create a great edit page under a Belo regime. When the mandate is "be better, but still be sure not to offend anyone," you get lame jokes like the Whoopee line above from people who are capable of so much more.