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

Are we trendy, yet?

The WSJ has a new report on trends in an assortment of industries, including publishing:

A cynical newspaper maxim holds that you need just three examples to prove a "trend."

But what happens if those examples raise questions about the integrity of, say, newspaper publishing? Are we still talking trend? Or mere coincidences?...

"It's an antiquated system," Mr. Arthur says. Things will change, he says, when publishers begin tracking sales and returns of their newspapers electronically. "Has anyone heard of a bar code?" he asks rhetorically.

AND he works for the company that supported me when I started my first newapaper riot

Not a lot in this Ed Cone interview will be new to our readers, but he says it so damn well.

Our future subscribers

Readers applaud the DMN's latest round of improvements.

Really mobile news

A Spanish company is delivering specially formatted news pages, including advertising, to mobile phones. Another case where Europe is ahead of us.               
          
          
            
          
               
         
            

Weekend hodgepodge

Y'know, blogging about our ideas is a lot more fun than creating reasonable proforma financials from whole cloth (as I spent the day doing with our CFO). It is, however, substantially less lucrative. As usual, when we've got a backlog of blog-able stuff, we roll out the bullet points:

• Another newspaper blog: Circulation Dropping.
• I just became the last person I know to switch to Firefox. Much faster; less buggy and uses less memory. Nice.
• PaidContent has a couple interesting posts on the inevitable quibbles over ads in RSS feeds.
• Speaking of ads, anybody else noticed that the ad strip on "At a Glance" has been house ads the past few days? And where was World Market on the back of Friday's Guide?
• Our regular readers will find a lot of common themes in this Jay Rosen/Matt Welch tag team on the idea of an opposition press.
• Matt also riffs on a proposed "blogger code of ethics." I've been thinking a bit about a code of ethics for our team, but I think we'll just adopt Matt's: "Try real hard not to be a total jackass."
• More from Matt: The Ventura County Star has a nice hyperlocal website, which was written up over at OJR: ..."It's both a news site and an online home for the local community. They understand the area they serve, providing strong daily news coverage, live updates of high school sports, community photos, staff blogs, Webcams, and interactivity with clear design and navigation. They do something other local sites should do -- providing links right on the home page to coverage of specific towns in their coverage area."

  In other words, this site has an obligation to cover all of Ventura County, a scenic area with mountains, forests, towns and beaches northwest of Los Angeles. Rather than thinking globally -- whether that means the world, U.S., California or even Ventura County-wide -- the site drills down to the community level from its home page. That has helped it hit profitability thanks to online classifieds; additionally, it had 243,000 unique visitors this past September, according to the Star (registration required).

Less content; less cola

It's the little things the little bitty things
Like the way that you remind me I've been growin soft
It's the little things the itty bitty things
It's the little things That piss me off

-- Robert Earl Keen

Folks, I try. I really do. This blog is supposed to be about our launch, but somehow I keep devolving into Belo-bashing.

Grievance du jour: I went to the deli closest to my office for a quick to-go lunch. To wash down my spicy chicken wrap and Zapp's chips, I ordered a large Diet Pepsi. The cup used to be a nice tall 32oz.

In a marketing scam perpetrated by the folks at Belo, that cup has been replaced by the one pictured here-- 12 oz at best. And advertising the News' Cliff's Notes.

This means War.

Open-source crackpots

One of the benefits of creating a product that starts online and then propagates to other mediums is that you have virtually limitless space to "show the work." It may not be as widely read or critical to communicate as the "main story," but it is memorialized to dispel issues of out of context quoting, for instance.

Yesterday, I was using a feature from the Rhino Times, a unique weekly in my hometown, as an exemplar for our team: To me, one of the most fascinating features they have is "The Sound of the Beep," a verbatim trascript of the messages on their answering machine.

As if to underscore the point, Tim Rogers posts a conversation he had yesterday with a disgruntled D Magazine reader. Absolutely priceless.

Imagine, if you will, an entire staff of reporters, covering news at the niche interest and neighborhood level on a daily basis. Imagine them showing this level of detail in their reporting and posting of response.

If you like that vision, you're probably one of our future subscribers. We'd love to hear from you.

Pizzed off about privacy

A privacy-loving pal sent me this hilarious ACLU video envisioning a pizza delivery in the not-too-distant future.

This fellow is a good example of one of my biggest concerns about our model. He believes in it; thinks it's sustainable; and would never personally participate.

As I've said, the genie is out of the bottle. But if companies like Acxiom get too sassy for their britches, the progress of using data to produce consumer good will be set back to the point that even Moore's law won't help us.

Print isn't dead,but online is catching up fast

Yesterday, I presented our stuff to a council of trusted business leaders to get some insight on how best to present our plan. One assumption that they couldn't seem to buy was that online vs. print readership was nearing the tipping point.

Two articles today bolster the assumption:

• Christian Science Monitor: Last month, people spent 40.2 percent of their time online viewing content, more time than they spent on communication (39.8 percent), commerce (15.8 percent), or search (4.3 percent), according to an Internet Activity Index released Thursday. It was the second straight month that the index had shown content as the highest-rated activity...

The only certainty may be that online content of some kind will be king. "The Internet is inherently an information medium," he says. "It's too efficient and sensible a way to distribute information for it not to become very powerful. That, I think, is the good news for online publishers."

• DMeurope: There has been a rise in the amount of time people spend online, with the internet now accounting for 20 per cent of Europeans’ media consumption, according to research commissioned by the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA).
  
  The study places the internet above both magazines (eight per cent) and newspapers (11 per cent) in terms of media consumption, and not far behind radio (30 per cent)...
  
  Increasing numbers of consumers are using the internet as opposed to traditional methods to perform daily tasks such as booking tickets (45 per cent), reading newspapers (37 per cent), chatting to friends (35 per cent) and shopping (31 per cent)...
  
  While 88 per cent use e-mail regularly, 61 per cent visit news sites and almost half look to organise their finances online.

Europe is generally a bit ahead of the US on these sort of trends, but it's easy to see the direction things are moving.

Last words on nonlocal content

Our newsie reader answers back to our discussion of Pegasus as a niche product:

I think we agree. My objections were mostly to what I perceived as a claim that your model was the best-and-only rather than a particular part of the marketplace. In a previous life, i worked for a zoned section that competed against what we contemptuously called a "shopper." In retrospect, my contempt was at least partly misplaced. The shopper was able to represent one particular community much better than my paper ever could have -- or should have. (Heck, we read it every week to make sure we weren't getting beat. And sometimes we were...) If you can fill that kind of niche over and over and over, there's surely an honorable place for that in journalism. And if you can figure out a way to make money with your model -- more power to you! And you can be pretty sure that the day you prove it works, every media company in the US will be scrambling to duplicate it.