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

Good press

Lest anyone doubt the power of good PR, Steve Rubel's post on us last night introduced us to the wider media community in a big way. Today we saw about triple our regular traffic, most of it from outside Dallas. Proving the Long Tail theory, his post was linked many times in the blogosphere today, yielding lots of supportive comments and a few fiskings. Our email has been flooded by well-wishers and job seekers.

We learned in the process that our overview copy on the right rail probably needs some improvement so that it's easier for new readers to get the gist of what we're about. There are several misinterpretations possible. ('Tis hard to articulate only part of a plan and be clear about it.) I'll address those issues in a later post, and will also answer some of the good questions we got today. Would love to do it now, but today was for the day job, and Mrs. Peg is more than deserving of a birthday dinner, so further correspondence will have to wait until later tonight or sometime tomorrow.

Gimme back my bullets

Today was another brain-hurty day of financial wranglings, but there are lots of interesting things to post. So, you know the drill-- bullets.

• Hail Wikipedia! AP now gives it props as a credible source. And, they're moving into news. We certainly hope to retain the spirit of such ventures, but we think that it'll be hard to take the wiki concept into local news -- it moves too fast, and you can't count on unpaid citizen journalists to be there every single day.
• We've talked before about OhMyNews as a foreign model that should give us hope. Guess what-- They're making money. Look East, young Red Horse.
• The free v. paid wars rage on. Note that Belo doesn't give up the number of paid subs for Cowboys Extra.
• Jay Rosen has an exhaustive review of the blogosphere on the MSM's flubs in the recent non-Ukranian election.
• Blogging and Journalism are already sleeping together: Look closer at the two sides, however, and you'll find that there's far more crossbreeding going on between these particular Capulets and Montagues than you might expect from all the hue and cry. The reality is that the line between "blogger" and "journalist" -- and between "amateur" and "pro" -- is already extremely fuzzy. And if you think things are blurred now: well, just wait a little while longer, because soon enough, things are going to start to really get interesting.
  Duh. See The Scrolldown for an early example.
• What a tangled Web we weave: Our discovery of MicroPersuasion leads to a nice mention. And another. And another. Welcome to our new friends.
  

Fitting that it is August 4, 2014that Googlezon wins the news wars

After all, that is my birthday. My 42nd, to be exact.

You see, we've just received a "history" of media from 2014. I'm pleased to announce that much of our businessplan comes to see the light of day. (Even the seminal Reason article is noted.)

Creepy. And brilliant. Peg's must-watch of the week.

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AFTERTHOUGHT: Y'know, the creepy part about this vision of the future was the end, where they talked about all journalistic integrity and ethics being less than an afterthought.

It strikes me that this is a likely scenario unless journalists make an effort to embrace and adopt the Google/Amazon/Rewards technology.

In fact, that's what we're about -- Journalists taking the wheel before the automatons, be they human or silicon, take over the whole show.

Analagous models

One of the things we want to do is to empower small, local retailers with the same type of business intelligence that Wal-Mart is using to roll over them. We also think that a hyper-local vehicle with pay-for-performance advertising will also bring little guys into the conversation in a way previously impossible in large consumer markets.

So, it's nice to see somebody else doing something similar: Big Idea marketing from Hugh MacLeod for a Saville Row tailor.

Free-dom's just another wordfor nothin' left to lose

This Guardian article somewhat reinforced the feelings of dread brought up by CNN offering its wireless content for free:

Yet despite the rocketing growth in online advertising - estimated at more than 30 per cent but up to 60 per cent in some sectors - most papers wonder how long they can depend on banners and pop-ups. Internet purchases may have reached a staggering £40bn, but newspapers seem to be missing out.

"It's the only medium where you get content free," says Alexandra White of the UK Association of Online Publishers. "In other media like TV and film people are used to paying. Revenues from online have all been coming from advertising and that's sustainable for now. But publishers have been keen to look for other revenue. Now they're looking at what unique propositions they can offer, like The Guardian's weblogs."

At the upper end of the market it is widely accepted that paid-for content is the way ahead. It's hard to charge for news, because of its general availability elsewhere, but archive news can be paid for, as can specialist information. FT.com introduced a two-tier subscription last year and has more than 55,000 subscribers, while most of the other nationals have identified niche content that readers value enough to pay for. The Independent charges for some columns, the Telegraph and Times for crosswords and The Times for fantasy football.

And stateside, everyone has been giving it away too, creating a free-milk society that's a major contributor to the industry's problems.

Around the watercooler at the day job (where we charge for our online content, unless you're a print subscriber or someone who asks nicely), we've looked to the WSJ as the paid-content model hero. But you have to wonder -- their test of opening the site up for free last week couldn't have been just a matter of academic curiosity.

The crux o' the problem?:

Yet there is a delicate balancing act between making money by charging for services and keeping enough free content to maintain traffic for the advertisers. Allow reader numbers to drop and advertising revenue will go the same way, yet having a small group of motivated subscribers can be a great investment when targeting them for other sales.

Where do we come in?:

According to Simon Waldman, debates about degrees of paid content are irrelevant. "The big question is how newspapers will fit into an internet which is increasingly providing a "citizen's media" with bloggers and Google - people create their own media and newspapers become less the arbiter of what's important in the world."...Seeing print and online as rivals is no longer the point. "People in newspaper offices debating the threat of the net have a Ptolemaic view, where the Earth is at the centre of the universe," says Waldman. "Things are evolving so rapidly, they need to work out how to stay relevant."

Entrepreneurs anonymous

What I was looking for when I found the PR site discussed below was this post on entrepreneurship on Crossroads Dispatches.

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately, for obvious reasons. In addition to Evelyn's post, there's the Godin book. I read most of it today-- quite good, although I personally could do without the "chain letter stories" at the middle. ("Susie did x and now she's a multigazillionare. Bobby did Y and now he's on the soupline.") Highly recommended though, if only for "The Bootstrapper's Manifesto."

While downloading the book at ChangeThis, I stumbled upon a sample of Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start. Another excellent read that made me feel a lot better about some of the strategic moves we've made.

A recurrent theme in all of the above is this: even we wage slaves can be entrepreneurs. In fact, in today's world, you'd damn well better be.

The Long Tail wags the dog

One of the most important posts we've had so far, in terms of providing an understanding of the viability and importance of hyper-local content and advertising, was the one on the economic theory of The Long Tail.

Via a link from Evelyn Rodriguez, comes a post by Steve Rubel, a PR Strategist- blogger, on how to use the Long Tail to get coverage for a client.

Interestingly, his whole blog, Micro Persuasion, is "on how blogs and participatory journalism are impacting the practice of public relations."

Folks, when the PR people have jumped on board, it's a real deal. Take note.

Hyper-International?

We talk about covering the local and ceding the rest of the world to the MSM. Circulation Dropping wonders if they're up to the task.

A step for mobile news,but is it forward?

In Europe, CNN is offering a free wireless news push, sponsored by Xerox. This is important because it's an early mainstream indicator of demand for wireless news, but even more so because it's breaking the early-adopter mode of paid wireless content:

There will be those in the mobile content world who will find this type of deal a little disturbing. They are currently very pleased that consumers appear to associate mobile content with paying - in stark contrast to Internet based content. If the consumer starts being offered quality content for no money, they might get used to it.

Expect more deals like this from media owners, as Kevin Razvi, head of CNN International ad sales says, “Our expanding portfolio of wireless businesses exposes advertisers directly to a broad consumer base through a highly relevant service for an increasingly mobile and technically-savvy target audience.”

Ricky Nelson, publisher

But it's all right now, I learned my lesson well.
You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself

This Business Week commentary is a good overview of the tipping point media has reached. Also a clear articulation of the problems we solve:

Problem is, imposing higher standards would drive up the cost of journalism while cutting its dramatic value. And that leads to the second issue: The plain truth is that opinionated content -- such as Fox's The O'Reilly Factor with Bill O'Reilly -- is often simpler, snappier, and less expensive to produce than objective content. According to Larry Gerbrandt, a media consultant with Los Angeles-based AlixPartners LLP, it costs CNN and CNN Headline News about $300 million a year to put out the news, vs. about $65 million for Fox. "It is so much less expensive to operate a news channel that is primarily studio-based rather than having a worldwide newsgathering operation with people and equipment all over the globe," says Gerbrandt. "That is an enormously expensive operation."

So this is the emerging business model: You can make money targeting a small partisan audience on cable TV or on the Web, but it's much more difficult to cash in on the traditional mainstream audience for news. That's why NYU's Rosen speculates that CNN or MSNBC may try to attract more viewers by becoming a liberal alternative to cable leader Fox News Network. That may sound implausible, but given the overall business climate, the economic temptation to plunge headlong into the partisan fray is growing ever stronger. The independent press will never disappear completely, but it's not much of a stretch to imagine it shrinking.

But it's not all about partisanship. Just because Fox has made good by producing less original news and more opinion doesn't meant that's the only tactic for solving the strategic problem. It's one tactic, sure -- and it's been successful. Another tactic is focusing on covering news that no one else can or will, and then using the Fox strategy on everything else.

Aggregation. Disintermediation. Convergence.

I hate buzzwords as much as the next guy, but this is what tomorrow's media looks like.