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

Our future editors?

Been meaning to send props out to Eric Gentry, the editor-in-chief of DeSoto High School's Eagle Eye, and his staff, who debunked the claims a pricey gang intervention consultant was making to the school board. WFAA's Brett Shipp picked up the story, and it looks like the DMN edit board is singing its praises in tomorrow's edition.

Several of us were high school newspaper moguls, so we're duly impressed, both by the reporting and by the look of the paper (see video) -- very sophisticated.

This developing story is a great example of how amateur journalists (or pros in training) and the MSM can and should work hand-in-hand.

Premium blend

Hugh Macleod:

Many of us make our living simply because other people are willing to pay a premium for something.

INFORMATION: Too busy to find out about the latest movies. That's OK, I'll gladly pay a premium to hear what the jounalist in The New Yorker thinks.

FOOD: Too busy to figure out an interesting place for my date. That's OK, I'll pay a premium and take her to a really expensive restuarant. Even if she doesn't like the food, she'll be so impressed by the decor it won't matter.

RENT: Too busy to find out where the hot real estate deals are. That's OK, I'll just pay a premium and move into an already-gentrified neighborhood.

CLOTHING: Too busy to find out what goes into the making of a really nice suit. That's OK, I'll just buy a well-known label whose schtick I'm in tune with. Good enough for the guys at GQ, good enough for me etc.

But of course, the more information somebody has, the more they know about what's really going on, the less willing they are to pay a premium.

The less willing you are to pay a premium for a cab, the more willing you are to walk.

The less willing you are to pay an extra $600 just for the label on the jacket, the more likely you'll buy something from the Chinese guy on Mott Street who nobody has heard of.

The less willing you are to spend $300 impressing her with a fancy restaurant. The more willing you are to take her to the weird Indian place in Brooklyn.

The less willing you'll spend $6 on a magazine just to find out if the movie's good or not. The more willing you'll e-mail some Bulagrian film geek whose opinion matters far more to you.

The less willing you are to fork over your $10 million dollars to the ad agency, just because the Creative Director really wants to make this certain commercial. The more willing you are to try out new technology the Creative Director has never even heard of.

The smarter the market, the harder it is to charge a premium.

Whenever I hear traditional media and marketing people get snippy about blogs, Cluetrain, the advent of "Citizen's Media" etc, I know the reason. It has nothing to do with intellectual honesty.

It has everything to do with the erosion of the high premium their jobs command.

We live in interesting times.

Trying to parse where we fit in that world -- we're old media people trying to think in new media ways. We want to help you find that  Chinese Guy on Mott Street. But we want somebody (a reader, an advertiser, etc.) to pay a premium-- because that information, or more appropriately, that connection is worth it

Is it the death of premium, or a transformation to a different one?

Developing...

Return of the bullets

• Advertisers are losing control of their messages. And that's A Good Thing.
     
• Life is too short to stray from your passion. There's a member of our team who should take comfort in this Evelyn Rodriguez post about now.
   
• Internet news is cool again. Heh heh. (Note: NYT.com seems to be beating bugmenot for now.)
   
• A rough analysis of whether print newspapers in decline can save themselves online. The answer, such as it is, points to a third voice being The Way.
   
• Our gracious host dishes a bit about life, our plan and Ipod Shuffle Girl #3.
   
• Why print?
   
• Disintermediation -- it's like plastics, baby.
   
• "Balance does not mean giving everyone the same space." Yeah.

The long run?

For those who think it will take a long time for a new online-led hyperlocal news model to take hold, I submit the following:

1. On September 28, 2004, a Google search for the term "podcasts" netted 24 hits. Today, that number exceeds a half-million. (Drop the "s" and it's more like 1.5mm.)
2. The chart below shows blog growth since April of last year.

DMN claims the chain e-mail beat

One of the revelations I've had over the past couple of weeks (with an assist from some persuasive friends) is that Our Little Project really isn't about competing with the incumbent local daily -- in the launch case, the Dallas Morning News. We're filling an unfilled niche, not displacing them from theirs. 

That's been an evolution of concept, though, and I sometimes let our propaganda get too far afield. Longtime readers will remember that my exploration of the concepts that we're bringing together started from frustration with Our Daily Paper.

So, to be clear, this post comes from my perspective as a reader and a blogger, and should not in any way be interpreted as throwing rocks at a potential competitor:

---

This morning's DMN contains an unsigned editorial urging fairness in the bashing of mainstream media:

We're the first to give the new media their due, and the last to defend the traditional media when they fall short of their mission. But, darn it, fair is fair.

Please provide examples of the DMN giving the new media it's due. Frankly, I can't think of many examples of them giving competitive old media its due.

(Virtually every publication/reporter in town has been faced at some point with breaking an exclusive story, only to see a DMN reporter then call the same sources for duplicative quotes and report them without citing the original article. Happened to my folks on the dayjob at least twice in the past year.)

Oh, and watch your salty language there Mr., um, oligarchy of opinion writers hiding behind a masthead.

If those who disseminate news by blog and e-mail want to be taken seriously, they've got to mind their accuracy just like those of us still living in the dark ages of ink and paper – especially when they're taking potshots at us.    

Take the case described by columnist Steve Blow in Sunday's Metro section. The medium in this instance was a recurring e-mail; the theme was that old saw about the traditional media ignoring good news.    

So, the editorial board of one of America's largest daily newspapers is using its precious ink, paper and constitutional license to respond to a chain email?!?

C'mon guys. You're late to the party. Where were you on NeimanMarcusCookieRecipe-gate? Did you let us know what to think about deposed Nigerian princes?

So, maybe this is an example of them giving another media its due -- and then some. Of course, they're picking on the wrong media. If Glenn Reynolds, or Andrew Sullivan or Kos had been on this story, it would have been one thing. But tsk-ing the blogosphere over a chain email or a few posts at some small blogs is like attacking all daily newspapers as PR machines because the Daily Commercial Record runs press releases on its front page. Does the DMN edit board not see the difference, or are they just hoping that their readers won't?

Well, "this" was the story of an Iraqi artist who used bronze from a  toppled statue of Saddam Hussein to sculpt a tribute to the U.S. soldiers who died in liberating his country. And "this" was reported at length in The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal and other big, bad-news-only newspapers. In March 2004, as a matter of fact – whereas the e-mailers are still presenting it as news.

This is an excellent argument for opening up one's archives. To be fair, the DMN archives of wire stories are open far enough back to fact-check the particulars of this one. Ironically, I was unable to find the March 27 story referenced in the Blow column in a search of DallasNews.com or of the paid archive.

Sometimes, unfortunately, facts get in the way of a good – that is to say, newsworthy – story. Newspaper reporters and editors regularly spike stories (now there's a term from the Pleistocene era) because some juicy tip doesn't pan out as advertised. It's part of the business. It's part of being a responsible purveyor of information.

Journalism 2.0 methodology:

1. Don't write about chain emails unless they're local in nature. And then only if they're true, interesting or funny.
2. Post the thing on the site saying: This is an email we received. Don't know if it's credible. We're researching.
3. Research.
4. Follow-up post: Verify, debunk or clarify. Link to outside source material. Refrain from doing so in a patronizing tone.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So wise up, media bashers. Today's basher can easily become tomorrow's bashee.

Touchy, touchy. Being bashed means that you're part of the conversation. Is this a conversation you really want to have?

---

UPDATE (6 PM):

• Rod Dreher counters our point about the DMN giving new media its due. (No permalink:@ Jan 26,  1:11 PM). Fair enough, but note that he was the author of the three examples cited. That's a lone voice in the wilderness; not an editorial policy.
• A kind reader provided us with a copy of the March article in question. It's a PDF and a verbatim search on the DMN site and in the archive continues to yield no story hits.
• An unscientific study of our traffic results today shows that this little rant brought us about double our usual traffic. About 90% of that was from The Frontburner; and maybe 5% from the DMN blog, which barely outpaced the Midlothian Family Network in terms of referral traffic.

Need a reading recommendation

Friends, I'm looking for a source to quote in some of our propaganda-- someone who's written extensively (preferably brilliantly) about the loss of sense of community in big cities. The more modern the better.

Please respond in the comments thread of this post. Thanks!

The bidness of BloJoCred

Jay Rosen discusses the high points of the conference. This one stuck out for me big time:

Rick Kaplan teaching us why blogging has economic value to MSNBC that it might not have if you don't run an operation like MSNBC.  He likened the situation to Ted Turner owning the Atlanta Braves. They were not worth as much to most owners because it was hard to make money running a baseball franchise. "They would have to go to the seventh game of the World Series, not the sixth, to turm a profit every year," he said.

But since Turner owned a cable network and selling air time is a business that does make money, the Braves were profitable for him to own. They fed good content through the pipes. Blogging, he suggested, would be profitable in this way, even if you can't "make money at it." Exactly how the analogy applies he did not say.

I think we're how it applies. Or at least we can be, on a lot of local levels.

Now playing:  Jack Ingram - One Thing

What's that got to do with the price of tea in Oak Cliff?

Our gracious host has a post emblematic of what I consider to be one of the great disconnects of the Internet age.

Local (which is where I would classify grocery pricing) is the one niche that the Internet hasn't really figured out-- not in a comprehensive, user-friendly useful way. It doesn't seem scalable, so most are afraid to go there armed for bear.

That's the opportunity.

To free or not to free

Anyone who's talked to me for more than five minutes knows that I scoff at the strategy of publishing free "lite" tabloid newspapers to try to lure in people who don't read.

If you don't read, you don't read. This strategy strikes me as a desperate answer from providers who can't figure out how to pay for insightful and investigative local journalism. In our informal focus groups, we've found that there are lots of educated, affluent folks who read voraciously -- just not their local newspaper.

Lots of smart people, like Evan Cornag and those interviewed in this BusinessWeek article, disagree.

Tim Porter helps set them straight:

Somewhat lost in Cornog's lengthy exploration of civic literacy is a paragraph that mentions a report given at last year's APME convention by Robin Seymour, director of research and readership at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Writes Cornog:

Seymour "revealed the results of her research into the top items of interest for younger, so-called 'light' readers. In order, they are: health/fitness, investigative reports on important issues, the environment, natural disasters/accidents, and education." (Emphasis added.)

To me, those topics sound like opportunities for serious journalism. It seems at least a kernel of interest remains within the coming generations for substantive news. The challenge is to convert that interest into readership. But, and here is the question, readership of what?

That notion is echoed by a twenty-something looking for a reason to read the paper. And a headline writer who proves the point by missing it.

Journoblogaramafest aught-five

Some of the luminaries of the blogging and journo world(s) are gathered at Harvard for a confab on, well, journalism and blogging. Since anonymous proprietors of not-yet-launched businesses didn't make the invite list, we'll rely on others for the lowdown:

• Jarvis is semi-live-blogging the event.
  • Jay [Rosen]: "Actually, they're working for an online newspaper that has a print edition."
  • Chris Lydon gives us his best Emerson quote ever: "Do not destroy the mass media but liberate the individual from the mass."
    
    
• Via Ed Cone, John Robinson (emph mine):
  
  News is a conversation, not a lecture. My readers know more than I do. Journalism is a function; blogging is a form.

  Look, we're going to continue to pay staff members to "cover the community," to monitor the powerful, to give voice to the voiceless, to shine light in dark place, to do all those things that people like me got into the business to do. That's journalism. That's giving citizens the information they need to self-govern. Readers are smart enough to believe us. If we're good, if we blog wisely, if we let readers in the door and help us, if we tell their stories and let them tell their stories, they will trust us. It's all good.

  Everything else is BS.

• And for those who need The Official Imprimatur, the WSJ spills some ink on it.