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

A partial rebuttal

A reader counters the earlier DMN post:

Yeah, today's story is dumb beyond words.

But as for whether you were prescient? Not so much about the food section.
Truth: There's more food content running Saturday then they used to run in the standalone section, most weeks. Whether it's tasty content or filler is a topic for another post. But this past Saturday's section, themed about breakfasts, had three recipes I clipped...1:-{)> The Swedish pancakes were pretty good.

I'll agree that the volume of food content has actually increased, despite my early snarking. I was referring to the descriptive similarities between Adam's post and the old parody.

But that still leaves open the debate as to whether general recipes should be in the purview of a local newspaper.

Another member of Team Pegasus adds:

And if you thought the etiquette piece in the DMN was condescending, how about this article from the same page -- advice on living in a haunted loft.  No, really!  But best of all, it's designed for the Hispanic community.

OK gang-- like the earlier drafts of our propaganda pieces, we're focusing too much on the problem and not enough on the solution. Sniping hour is over. Back to the work at hand. I have to go cancel that help wanted ad for our        consejero cucui expert.

Now playing: Paul Simon - Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

Frequency, cont.

I'm glad to see so much discussion in the comments on the print frequency question. In addition, we got this message from an overseas newsstand agency(!):

My 2 cents...

No hard copy edition.

As soon as you lock into the world of hardcopy you have those constraints as well.

Stay online and exploit the blog/website technologies and BEYOND.  Going physical is a step backwards.

And a student at an exceptionally innovative J-school chimes in:

In response to your question of today or recently about the frequency of a print edition, this is something I thought about a while ago and now forget most of my reasoning.

In my mind, the print edition is useful not just for the people who aren't web savvy. A print edition is an edition. It has bounds. I find that reading news on the Internet gets exhausting. I have constant updates from my RSS reader, and additionally check and recheck a few news and other websites. But it's tiring to follow links around the web.
I always feel that I'm missing something. With a print edition -- or at least the idea of a self-contained edition, at least I know that I'm getting a complete meal, as determined by an editor. I'm not just binging on the salad of new media-related blogs, or the dessert course of left-wing politics.

That said, I don't think you necessarily need a daily print edition, but I do think you need a daily edition of some sort -- maybe it's a pdf edition that readers can easily print out if they want, or download to read during a commute. The edition is the baseline that casual newsreaders can turn to to keep up with the news without being overwhelmed, and that others can fall back on when they're too busy or on news overload. On top of that, you can have the more up-to-date news content through SMS or whatever. And you can back it up with a weekly or monthly print edition designed for more leisurely reading.

So I guess I didn't really answer your question. If I had to, I'd say a thrice-weekly print edition would be sufficient, but make a digital edition available the other three days and a special weekend section.

Keep those cards and letters coming...

Now playing: Counting Crows: Round Here [Live}

How to snipe at the DMN while maintaining my New Year's resolution to forestall myself from such activities

Let others do it for me.

And remember prescient posts past.

Frequency

One argument that never seems to die among our group is that o'er frequency of the print edition:

Daily? The original thought. Expen$ive. But makes us more accessible to the unwired and those who like to read sports scores over morning coffee. But perhaps overly-redundant  for folks who read a continually updated website with many digital feeds. Did I mention Expen$ive?

Weekly? Certainly cheaper. But apt to make people initially write us off as an alt-weekly. And much harder to sell subscriptions.

Somewhere in between?  Our original premise was to figure out what local media would look like if created from scratch with 2005 technologies. So, in that world, what is the appropriate frequency for the print edition of a content-rich, open-source, hyperlocal, conversational news provider?

I often ask for feedback from the Pegasi and other mediati who frequent this site. This time I mean it --  I could really use some more voices on this one.

Now playing: Sly & the Family Stone - I Want to Take You Higher

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UPDATE: Then there's the matter of charging for the site. You can debate if, when and how much. I'm very interested in seeing what the NYT and other big boys do. If they all start charging, that could tweak our plan for the national and international desks.

Meantime, outside the consumer world, things are moving in the direction of free.

In bed?

My fortune cookie from tonight's Chinese take-out:

:-) You will take a chance in something in near future :-)

Now playing: Oxford American 1998 - Yes We Can - Lee Dorsey

N&R:The other side of the horn

Amidst all the hoopla over the N&R's plans to innovate, comes a view from a competitor, courtesy Mark Tapscott.

I'm not about to pick sides in this one: both The Rhino and the N&R are (and have long been) influences as my hometown papers. The brothers Hammer grew up in the same church I did and at least one of them attended (and, like me, was on the swim team at) my alma mater. And, the N&R  was very good to me in the midst of my first journalistic misadventure. Both do some very smart things.

But the cynic in me says that the kind of change the N&R is shooting for is hard to pull off and sustain without a fierce competitor breathing down your neck. And not in a "hurting profits," context -- I'm talking Braveheart-style life-or-death stuff.

So, my modest proposal: The Rhino should go daily online. Immediately.

Now playing: Charles Mingus - Better Git It In Your Soul

Weekend required reading

• Simon Waldman: The importance of being permanent. A big weakness of most news sites.
• Watch out, traditional media
• Not directly Peg related, but our gracious host has a fabulous interview with Andy Hertzfeld as part of his week of all-Mac all the time blogging.
• NYT @ the crossroads. (Everything is always at the crossroads.)

Now playing: Camper Van Beethoven - Where the Hell is Bill?

A humble question

Why the @%#$! would anyone set their RSS feed to deliver only part of a post?! I'd almost understand in the case of a commercial site, but there are plenty of personal blogs sans advertising that truncate their feeds, and they're in danger of dropping from my blogroll. No big deal, but multiply that times many and you're out of the conversation.

Now playing: The Black Crowes - Gone

Better pointed bullets than pointed words

Have some of both:

• Newspapers aren't the only medium past their peak.
     
• G'boro update from Jay Rosen (who has links to the source material)
     
• A great example of hyperlocal citizen journalism from Baristanet.
        
• Jeff Jarvis on the MSM in the Kubler-Ross stages of death.
        
• Hugh Hewitt in The Weekly Standard on A Unified Theory of the Old Media Collapse: On Monday on my blog, I suggested that reporters and producers employed by Big Media should make available their biographies and résumés on the web for easy viewing by the public, as well as answers to ten brief questions, including: "For whom did the reporter vote for president in the past five elections? Do they attend church regularly and if so, in which denomination? Do they believe that the late-term abortion procedure known as partial-birth abortion should be legal? Do they believe same sex marriage ought to be legal? Did they support the invasion of Iraq? Do they support drilling in ANWR?" The outrage in response to my suggested disclosures from some bloggers was intense and immediate. One even suggested that posing such questions was incipient McCarthyism.
  
  While those exact questions aren't in play, our reporters will all wear their biases like badges of honor.
     
• Lots of chatter about the Pew study on blogsplosion. Unsurprisingly, Jarvis has the best stuff.
     
• Lots of buzz on the recent Craig's List report. Having read the whole thing, I have a longer post percolating, but it will have to wait. However, this take was particularly interesting to me: Though Craig at the moment appears to be staying the course, he easily could add traditional news, entertainment listings, sports and weather to become -- Voila! -- an online newspaper rivaling the web traffic of most major titles. Add audio and video, and he becomes -- Voila again! -- a challenger to radio and TV. If he invites his community to contribute to his newsgathering efforts, he wisely will add another (no-cost) tie that binds.
  
  Does this mean that we drop the "Craig's List with content" analogy out of the propaganda pieces or push it further up?
     
• Tim Porter on the NYT purchase of freebie commuter paper in Boston.
     
• On that note, whaddya'll think of my new marketing slogan for the Dallas launch?:
  
  They call it Quick.
  We call it yesterday's News.
         
• Considering "content"
     
• Chris "Long Tail" Anderson has a tailblog as he works on a book on the topic.
     
• Ads replacing rings?
         
• How can traditional media and the grassroots work together? Because we must.
     
• Maybe micropayments (by day, by story) aren't such a bad idea.
     
• Indie freebies have to think outside the box. They won't succeed as leaner, meaner versions of the traditional metro publishing model, especially when the model itself is being shredded by a host of new information and entertainment media.
  
  Agreed. This is the "Why we aren't the AM Journal Express" part of the conversation.
  
  Talking with one of our team today, it occurred to me:
  
  It's about three things -- Content. Distribution. Revenue. If your model for all three isn't revolutionary, then you're in deep trouble.
           
• Eric is back. Ruben is gone.
     
• Consolidation is baaad. MmmK?
     
• Programming note: Blogging is likely to be spotty and half-assed for a while (probably a week and change). We're at a crucial moment (the second of many), and are working dilligently and around the clock to ensure that we have a lot to "do about" (as opposed to talk about) very soon. Don't expect any bullet posts, or comment on much of anything that isn't earth-shattering.
  
  In the meantime, subscribe to the RSS feed; re-read the "Best of" posts on the left rail; and follow Rosen, Gillmor, Jarvis and Anderson.

Now playing: Tiger Army - Cupid's Victim

Could long-tail news kill advertorial?

Ed Cone writes about those insidious real-estate advertorials that run in virtually every newspaper in the country. Here in Dallas, they also run for car dealers.

That set me to thinking: Why do the accursed things exist anyway?

IMHO:

1. Journalists hate them.
2. Nobody reads them. (The one exception I've seen is in trade rags where the only advertorial allowed is a substantive piece that is labelled as an ad not because it shills, but because it is paid for.)
3. They don't bring any credibility to the advertiser. (Exception, see #2)
4. Save for misguided vanity, the only value they have is in getting the brand name mentioned and (perhaps) into the consciousness of the readers.

So why do they exist?

Because in the finite space of an analog edition, the groundbreaking of "Hobbs Landing," or the factory service award won by the local VW shop isn't big enough to be news.

But in a long tail environment, it is. The groundbreaking  is news to the folks in that neighborhood and to people shopping for a home. And it can be pushed to those folks as such. And, if the development plan is bad or the service at the dealer is actually sorry, a journalist (citizen or professional) can pick up that angle.

(Ironically, most newspapers run this stuff in the print edition, but omit it online.)

In fact, I would argue that this sort of stuff is pretty much at a distance down the long tail comparable to the elementary school (but not city) spelling bee championship and the neighborhood crimewatch. The only difference is that right now the realtor can afford to buy her way into the game while the spelling champ's dad can't.

This particular musing is admittedly still half-baked, as it was concoted while playing fetch in the rain with our dogs, so I'd welcome some input. It seems to me, though, that we're out of the business of determining what is news (everything is); and into the business of figuring out what news is most relevant to whom.

One nagging question: If you're giving the realtor the milk for free?...

Now playing: Living Colour - These Are Happy Times [#]

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UPDATE: As an afterthought-- If every ad is a relevant ad, then aren't ads content? And if everything is news in the long tail environment, then what is advertising?

I and a glass of scotch are going to think on that and get back to you.

But I've been saying this for a while: as fascinating as this Brave New World is to the editorial folk, I think the advertising minds best get engaged in it -- and fast.

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UPDATE to the UPDATE: My glass(es) of scotch reminded me that the lack of real engagement of the business side in this conversation is a primary reason for our existence. Duh.

Nothing to see here. Return to you own particular business paradigm.