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

Roaming bullets

I've been traveling since middle of last week, hence the posting drought. Some scattershots:

• Programming note: There has been some confusion among some new visitors to our blog. The Daily Peg blog is not our actual product. As the intro on the right hand rail of this page indicates, this is a marketing site; a beacon; a diary of developing what we're going to do. When we have a real product to show, you'll be the first to know.
     
• Lots of aggregation/convergence afoot: AP now publishes RSS feeds. And Topix is now the content provider for AOL Local. Aggregate or be unique. We intend to do both.
     
• Another new player in the Citizens' Journalism game: New West Network.
     
• Steve Outing defends Citizen Journalism and provides great advice for MSM players dipping their toes in the CJ pond. I met with a group of smart innovators in this realm this week and was reminded that the revolution won't really happen anywhere that the business-side isn't fully engaged. Jeff Jarvis gets that point, with Craigslist being the poster-child. So does Alan Mutter, who notes:
  Our mightiest newspapers turn into fumbling klutzes when they write about the industry's drooping credibility, swooning circulation and eroding advertising share.
  
  Inevitably and embarrassingly, they fail to address these problems with the rigor and intellectual honesty they typically train on topics that don't directly involve their economic self-interest. Coincidence? Perhaps.
     
• Evelyn Rodriguez: The conversations we aren't having and "Love attracts love" marketing theory.
     
• A thank-you to all those who have emailed to tell me about yesterday's DMN piece on blogs. I'll see it when I get home, since it's not available on their website.
   
• Why CRM is more important than CMS.
   
• The Greensboro N&R has a new byline: "Contributing Reader"
     
• Attention Jack MacDonald: Get a wi-fi connection and you could be our downtown bureau. Hint: Journalists tend to drink a bit.
     
• Peter Chernin's 10 Rules for Media Survival. Where are the rules for those who wish to thrive? (Or has that become moot?)
   
• Simon Waldman has a critique of Wikinews. His suggestions for its improvement read like they're ripped from the "differentiators" section of our business plan.

The Good Doctor's legacy

Via The Frontburner (who gave us some link love today), Phil Luciano points to the antithesis of HST's  work, something that could be solved with the magic we hope to create with Pegasus. (Yes, dammit. We said "magic." Get used to it.)

They say people are too busy to read newspapers. I say people are too busy to read boring newspapers. Newspapers once heaved and gasped and screamed with the intensity of the cities and people they covered.

Not anymore. Today's reporters are dullards. They have college degrees. They're book smart. That's good. But they treat reporting like a cubicle-dweller at IBM. They wait for news to happen: an agenda out of City Hall or news release over the fax.

Like we said: Use the new technology to enable us to go old school.

About about

Having been busy with non-blogging activities, my Bloglines blogroll is hopelessly backed up with things I've tagged to post about when I have the time.

Chief among those is Jay Rosen's discussion of the Times' purchase of About.com. Jay asked me what I thought about it today, and my response was (mostly) as follows:

---

Have been following this thread with interest. In my mind, the key pearl in your post is:

Times journalism, like the content of other Big Media firms, is created primarily for offline use, and then re-purposed on the Web. (When that cycle is reversed, the Web era in journalism truly begins.)

I think that one shift in mindset will be what really turns things around. Sometimes I fear I'm counting on it too much -- but in our early days, I think this will be our most noticeable differentiator.

As far as our model, we intend to be fully searchable, but think that there is a middle ground between freely available and walled off. We're still working it out, but our thought is that you can Google us and read any story you want for free and without registering, but you're limited to x number of stories a day at that level ("x" being something greater than one and less than the whole site.)

The idea is that registration, and maybe even subscription is crucial to our ad model. But, the ads are primarily local -- and its locals that will primarily use us every day multiple times per day. (We hope!) So why should I hassle you in NY with registration in order to monetize serving up an ad for a Chinese restaurant in East Dallas that does neither you nor the restaurateur any good. I can't imagine a lot of folks out of market wanting to read more than a couple things a day on our site -- and if they do, that's another business altogether.

Of course, the NYT is in a different business than we are -- they are a "national" site. We're all local, all the time.

Another reason to let anyone read a few stories a day without playing the registration game is so that we can be "part of the conversation" on blogs etc.

A key, we think, to registration is REALLY delivering a reward for registering, something that most sites don't do. At the NYT, registration doesn't enhance the site -- it's just a ticket to the fair. If you register with us, we'll customize your homepage with both implicit and explicit preferences based on where you live and what you like to read. And, if you shop at our advertisers who are in our pay-for-performance program, you'll get cash rebates. (Real, effortless rebates -- not the silly shopper programs a lot of papers are trying.)...

...But, to the original question. I don't think the About purchase was a great deal. Two things I've come to realize from my close watching of this world the past year are that:

1. Previously sci-fi technology is now insanely commoditized and cheap. My original budget to build our site? $3 million. (Admittedly guessing high.) Now, it's less than $100k for stuff that, as one of my compatriots says, is "just barely distinguishable from magic."
2. A really great idea can now build critical mass in a frighteningly short time -- See Bloglines. See podcasting.

The upshot? The NYT, if it had really wanted to, and would break free from bureaucracy, could have built something way cooler and more trafficked than About in ninety days.

One ancillary thought on why I question the About deal. Search engine placement is primarily in the hands of the people who make search engines. If Google changes its algorithm tomorrow, that whole rationalization for the purchase is moot. And anecdotally, I don't buy that they get such great placement. I'm a Google junkie and I almost never land on an About site.

In contrast, our little Pegasus site barely gets 100 unique visitors a day, and we come up ridiculously high in the search engines. (I can tell from our referrer reports. Take my most recent. For "sudden death eulogies" (not strung) we're number 5?!...

...Although there are a lot of details to be worked out, I've never been as sure of anything as the viability of our core principles (revised and simplified):

- Be unique. Where you aren't absolutely unique, aggregate.
- Deliver at the right time and the right way, as chosen by the reader.
- Conversations are better than monologues.
- Paid customers are good. Engaged customers are better.
- Be precise. (A reference to our ad model.)

Guardian Pegasi?

I caught a long segment with Curtis Sliwa on KRLD this morning. Sliwa is trying to bring his Guardian Angels to crime-ridden Big D and is in town to warm the shoulders of Madame Mayor and Chief Kunkle. When he wasn't hawking Nextel/Motorola walkie-talkies (lord, I hope he's got a sponsorship from them), he was answering calls from the locals, both supportive and not.

I'm not sure yet where I stand on the Angels' descent, but it struck me that when the group is working optimally, their contribution is deterrence, not confrontation. Bad dudes who think someone is patrolling and watching for them (I mean, someone besides, say, a cop) are less likely to commit a violent crime.

Now maybe I read too many comic books as a kid, but I remember the square-jawed goons were always looking over their shoulder to see if some nosy cub reporter was around the corner. 'Cos in an old-timey narrowly-drawn geographic beat system that newspapers used to employ, there was a fair chance they might be.

And maybe it's a day's worth of paint fumes talking. (The living room is well stippled, thank you.) But it seems to me that if a hypothetical news organization had a crew of 50-70 professional reporters, stringers and Citizen Journalists roaming the city, armed with cell phones and cameras; investigating every neighborhood crime they could scoop and actively patrolling for neighborhood news -- our little burg might not be in such dire need of saving. Because that, in and of itself, might be almost as much of a deterrent as a vigilant(e) group of volunteers.

Sure, we might be wearing fedoras with press tags instead of Sliwa's red berets, but we wouldn't be making the kind of confrontational citizens' arrests that make the Angels so controversial and potentially dangerous. Instead we'd be informing the citizenry. And it would be informing us. And each other.

And if you ever see any of our folks duck into a phone boot--

Oh, never mind. We don't have those anymore.

At least he never "lapsed into good taste"

Toils in the service of Pegasus kept me up late and away from the TV, so I awake to find not only that one of my journalistic heroes has killed himself (pictured at right as I'll always remember him), but that the scribes of the blogosphere have already issued eulogies far more eloquent than I could hope to create. So, just like we'll do post-launch on a national story, we aggregate:

• Jarvis: Thompson was really the first reaction to one-size-fits-all journalism. He was the argument that the grand shared experience of media in a three-network, one-newspaper-town world was actually bad because it was boring and institutional and inhuman. Thompson tried to inject humanity back into journalism. He injected it like drugs into his veins and, yes, sometimes it was a bad trip.
   
• Ed Cone: Thanks, HST. For Hell's Angels, snippets of which still bubble into my consciousness with some regularity 21 years after I read it on an overnight train to Rome.

  For this:

  "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." And everything that followed on that alarming trip.

  For the scatalogical note you scrawled to me in 2000 in response to a query for an article I was reporting on Garry Trudeau.
   

• JD Lasica: ...Thompson was in some ways a forerunner of the We Media movement.

  Yeah, he was known for gonzo journalism, but when you strip it down, it was about the idea that anyone with a typewriter, a modicum of reporting talent and the gumption to ask the hard questions could be a reporter. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and others dressed it up in fancier clothes and called it "the new journalism," but the idea was that journalistic objectivity was pretty much bullshit, that the writer was very much a part of the story he was covering -- a notion that is now a core precept of the blogosphere.

  Thompson was one of a kind. Rest in peace? No friggin' way.
     
• Lileks:  Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee died on the same Yahoo most-emailed page. There’s some telling symmetry in that. Dee, who died of organ failure, was a sunny perky teen idol with a dark past – sexual abuse, domineering show-biz mom, public divorce, alcoholism, health ills. But she “turned her life around,” in the lingo of Behind the Scenes; she had a good last act, and she didn’t trade on her pains to craft a public persona. People think "Sandra Dee," they think the happy teen Tammy still.
  
  HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” – that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman – meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read "Hell's Angels." That was a man who could hit the keys right.
     
• Bruce Castleberry: It's terrible news...mostly because now I will have to offer a fitting tribute and get raucously hammered tonight. At least he'll get a chance to terrorize Nixon in hell tonight....
     
• Lenslinger (whose tribute is the closest to what I would have said if it hadn't already been said): I discovered Thompson at age thirteen, when one of my more subversive older buddies slipped me a tattered copy of 'Hell's Angels'. Inside those well-worn pages, I found the most unlikely of role models - an unbalanced outlaw scribe who fascinated me as much as his salacious subject matter. That a journalist could interject himself into the action in such an incredibly entertaining way was nothing less than a revelation to me. It made me want to WRITE more than ever. Why not? This deranged wordsmith from the decade I was born in had cleared the way, blazed intoxicating skid marks through the hallowed halls of American Journalism. Soon I immersed myself in the H.S.T. canon, from 'Fear and Loathing' to 'Songs of the Doomed' to 'Generation of Swine'. Whiel other kids my age were busy idolizing sports figures, I was falling under the influence of a drunken Master, a dangerous uncle who could lay down incendiary narratives and broken prose like no one else before or after him. I was hooked, and still am. Not far from my computer, his many works fill my bookshelves, timeless testaments to the power of the caustically written word.

Traffic

Apropos of something, although I'm not sure what...

Was reminded of Alexa's traffic ranking graphs this weekend and made a couple interesting ones:

First, Texas' major market papers:

,

Now the largest 5 CMSAs where you wouldn't consider the major daily to be a "national" newspaper (excluding, therefore NY, LA, Chicago, DC):

The higher ranking of Boston makes sense -- in fact, I almost left it out as one of the "nationals." But it seems that the Houston Chronicle generates a lot more traffic than its analogous peers. Can some of our Houstonian friends give us a guess as to why?

Next, the DMN and the Chronicle next to Craigslist and the two most-visited blogs on the 'net. Craigslist traffic encompasses all the Craigslist cities, but remember: they have no "content" in the traditional sense.

Discuss amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic. The new media is neither new, nor a lady who says sooth in re: the future.

"CNN reporting on why blogs are more interesting than CNN"

Lots of people are talking about this week's Daily Show schtick on blogs and big media.

My favorite line was the bit about the Washington Post's new motto: "You heard it here -- twelfth."

I've said this to death, but it's an important notion to help us keep our focus: The digital native media -- whether that be blogs, podcasts, mobile or flash mobs -- has fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. And the mainstream doesn't like it.

This new guard can't fully replace the mainstream though -- the blogosphere, for instance, is great at fact-checking and jumping on the intriguing or controversial story. But, without people whose daily bread depends on getting the story filed, too much will get missed.

That's a big part of our opportunity. We don't have an existing newsroom structure or businesss model to overcome. We're starting with a model in which we don't produce it if anyone else can or will. Unique or aggregated. We can have it both ways.

The other day, someone put it this way: "You have amateur journalists and you have professional journalists. You have a system that puts checks on both. The only difference is whether or not they collect a paycheck."

We think that fully engaging the resources of both worlds will change the news business.

Hail of bullets

• Lots of smart people are talking about concepts that relate to our ad model. Whether you call it pay-for-performance or "sell side," pay attention -- it's where customers are leading us.
     
• Inadvertently supporting another of our dearly held beliefs, Fred Wilson points out a study showing that the top-performing modes of online advertising are all behavior based. Tasty.
     
• Can't believe how long it's been since I last quoted Jeff Jarvis:
  [E]etch this in brass and hang it on the newsroom -- and J-school -- wall: "Welcome to the new world of journalism, where every witness to news can report the news, thanks to the internet; where every citizen can question the powerful, thanks to the internet; where every speaker can be a pundit, thanks to the internet. Journalism is no longer the closed society of the gatekeepers. Journalism can no longer just lecture; now it must listen. News is freed from the limitations of paper and schedules and reporters' pens. Journalists should welcome the help, for journalists should believe that more information yields a more informed society and that is our goal."
     
• Creating Passionate Users is my new favorite blog. See today's discussion on how to make your user a hero (in the classic sense).
     
• Tim Porter continues his discussion of The Vanishing Newspaper (most recent nine posts). I'll analyze in more depth when I have time to read them all.
     
• Worried about all these seemingly-dead late 90's concepts come back to life? Take a breath, read about Gartner's Hype Cycle and relax.

Branding, ca. 2005

Courtesy Creating Passionate Users:

UPDATE:

• In one of our propaganda pieces (not written by your humble narrator), there's a nice piece of language: just barely distinguishable from magic. Yeah.
• A great example of that, and the heirarchy above: Google Maps. Mapquest has been there for ages, as has Yahoo! Maps. Yahoo! fills the bottom three rungs nicely. Mapquest fills the bottom two; the bottom three on a good day. I deleted both from my link bar after one search on Google. Sure, the incumbents had a headstart -- there was a time when I would have called Mapquest "totally f'in amazing."  But then there was a time when our family's new VCR was exciting.

Poor circulation

The latest print edition of Editor and Publisher contains an unsigned editorial, "No Circ Free-For-All." It's subscription only, but here are the high points:

Apparently, there's a new circulation scandal in the newspaper industry. But this one isn't about tossing bundles in the dumpster, fudging returns numbers, or paying retailers for copies they can't sell. No, this just-discovered scandal concerns newspapers that — get this — deliver copies to targeted audiences coveted by advertisers...

This would be a good time for everybody to catch their breath. While it's always a good idea to be as clear as possible about who is paying for which copy, the industry and Wall Street also need to recognize that free distribution is an effective way to reach audiences, one that has worked for alternative papers for decades — and may well be the future of daily newspapers...

It is absurd to think that the copy of USA Today picked up by the traveling businesswoman coming out of her hotel room or the exec flying in first class is not "quality" circ. The audited paid-circulation business model served newspapers well for more than a century, but the industry must now face the fact that it is increasingly out of step in a world where information delivered by nearly every medium appears to be free to the end user. Whole segments of the audience, such as youths and Latinos, are telling the industry that they want to read a paper, but don't want to pay for it. These customers are the future of newspapers, and cannot be written off in favor of some elusive ideal of "quality"circ.

The most risible aspect of this is so-called crisis in circulation is that third-party sales represent just a low single-digit percentage of total paid circulation at the relatively few papers that even have sponsored-sales programs. But if that share increases as publishers and advertisers identify new audiences they want to reach, it should be welcomed as growth, and not feared as "illegitimate."

Although it's easy to point to all the times you've trundled down the hallway in a hotel looking at copies of USA Today or the local paper that will never be touched by non-janitorial hands, what's truly risible is that the trade journal of the newspaper industry is using its bully pulpit to debunk "this faux scandal."

We may be right or wrong in what we think we can achieve at Pegasus News.  But we're sure of this much:

Until this industry realizes that in the 21st century, circulation is a "goofy metric," nothing else it does will save it from its downward economic slide.

As one of the central pillars of the newspaper business, that's a tough preconception to change. It's a preconception that newspapers will have to change not only internally, but also with the advertising community. In the midst of all the important talk about transparency, citizen journalism and the like, the anachronism of circulation-driven ad sales is the buried lede in the story of why our little world is undergoing a revolutionary change.

Circulation-driven advertising in a pay-for-performance world means that a trickle-down of decisions are being made based on the wrong metric. It means that you're trying to get as many readers in the door as possible instead of trying to engage your best readers in a way that spurs them to action (response to story, contribution to ongoing story, or advertising-based purchase). It means that you're spending time obsessing over third-party subscriptions instead of whether the story you pushed reader #167985 was relevant;  whether or not the ad attached was relevant; and whether or not she acted upon it.

A favorite saw in the circulation-based world was, "I know that half of my advertising dollar is wasted -- I just don't know which half." Pushing up ABC audits with third-party papers in hotels isn't going to do anything to solve that problem.

We're not saying that there is an easy fix. If we were handed the reigns of an incumbent city newspaper, I'm not sure that we would know exactly how to tackle it. (Hell, I'm sure we wouldn't.)

Perhaps that's why we're launching something entirely different.