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

The first rule of Fight Club...

For anyone who doesn't get how the MSM and other "mature industries" have gotten themselves in trouble, Dave Wheeler presents the Life Cycle of Rules.

Even more bullets

• Jeff Jarvis on why the New Media (he calls it Citizen's Media) shouldn't leave Google to serve as the universal ad rep/agency. As good an argument as any I've heard for our existence.
   
• The N&R takes a risk by playing down the Superbowl on A1 in favor of local news. Three commenters agree with the move.
     
• Steve Rubel points out that the hastening news cycle is leaving the MSM in the dust, a problem particularly evident on the weekends.
     
• Some good advice for mobile-izing a website.
     
• Meet the new media (guys) same as the old media (guys).

Belated bullets

Posting the past week has been embarassingly light, a problem compounded by a TypePad glitch over the weekend. Busy, but interesting times. Here's what we've been reading over the past week:

• Journalism is not stenography.
     
• Chris "Long Tail" Anderson concurs on the death of objectivity: The traditional premium on impartial journalism is a function of media scarcity: if you are the main or sole source of news you have an obligation to be balanced. That was certainly once true of America's newspapers, which in a big country are distributed by city, almost invariably in ones or twos. And the rest of American media took its journalistic-standards lead from newspapers.

  But the UK is different in that it has long had a national newspaper market. Thus there was no news scarcity and newspapers differentiated themselves by taking sides.

  Today in the US the newspaper is fading, as is its influence on American journalism: news and information is becoming a commodity. What will rise as a differentiating competitive advantage? I'd argue that it's not so much pure opinion and political partisanship (although that's been the case on radio) as it is sensibility and worldview.
     

• Speaking of the Tail, a TechCentralStation column looks at the Long Tail in the context of various media, including newspapers: In comparison [to the 50,000 "active" blogs], as of 1998, there were 1,489 daily "dead tree" newspapers in the US. Just to get a scope of what 50,000 daily newspapers means in terms of readership, let's look at a hypothetical weblog that's riding near the end of the tail. If it only has 100 readers a day, and there are 50,000 blogs with similar quantities of readership, that makes for a whopping 5,000,000 total readers. Five million readers would make weblogs the second largest newspaper group in the nation, behind Gannett, just ahead of Knight-Ridder and with twice the readership of The New York Times Co. And it's actually greater than five million, of course, since there are many, many blogs with many more than a hundred readers. And some of the millions of "not updated daily" blogs actually have fairly consistent readership. 
   
• Dan Gillmor advises newspapers on how to start conversation. Great advice that we're betting they won't take to heart.
     
• I'd really like to know how and why Hugh Macleod has tapped into my inner monologue: One of the more unfortunate things about entering the advertising profession at a young age, is that it invariably turns you into a compulsive "Trend Watcher" within nanoseconds...
  
  So to feed your addiction, you stop thinking. You start watching. Harder than ever.

  You read all the magazines, you watch all the TV shows, it doesn't matter how utterly bad they are. Your life becomes an orgy of mainstream popular culture. You begin feasting on it like a hungry animal. It doesn't matter that the client's business is going down the pan, what matters, dammit, is that Brad and Jennifer are still remaining the best of friends and in regular contact.

  Of course, the minute you step off this treadmill, the minute you start thinking about real people with real needs, wants and problems, you're dead. No more corner offices and 1965 Jaguar E-Types for you, Nosirree.

  But like they say, who the hell cares.
     

• Via Hugh, another must-read for the blogroll, Creating Passionate Users. The first post I read advises: Upgrade your users, not just your product.

That should be enough to chew on for awhile. More TK...

Local spam

Was writing and inadvertently lost one of those long bullet posts you all love so well. I'm not going to invest a half-hour in reconstructing it right this minute, so in the meantime, here's a discussion topic. Journos who get tons of press releases aren't eligible:

Have you ever gotten a spam that was local in nature? If so, what percent of your spam is local?

Now playing:  The Ozark Mountain Daredevils - Look Away

Left turn, Clyde

Not that we're about blogging, per se, but we are blog-inspired:

Hugh Macleod points out some impressive stats in service of the point that everybody needs to build their microbrand:

According to to its CEO, David Sifry, Technorati is now tracking 40,000 new blogs a day, up from 15K only a year ago. Source: Jeff Jarvis.

OK, that's the population of New York, every 6 months.

That's why we need to remember that our most important edition is the one distributed by The Medium Not Yet Invented. Two years ago, who new what a blog was? A year ago, who'd heard of an RSS feed? Six months ago, who new about podcasting?

Create content and then distribute it any which way you can.