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In an early moment of desperation, I thought of pitching Pegasus as a reality show a la' The Restaurant . On sobering up, I realized that would trivialize the product we were creating and create a circus that would make it next to impossible to build a business. That, plus no one would buy it.
Perhaps I should have called the good folks at Hearst.
I'm starting to notice instances (as opposed to discussion) of the kind of journalism that we intend to make SOP at Pegasus News:
The Powers That Be have definitely found the best possible replacement for my former gig. I think the technical term is "trading up."
This George Will column on the woes of newspapers isn't anything new to our readers. But his punchline may become my new standard answer when I'm asked "Why won't the incumbent dailies just copy you?":
The future of the big media that the young have abandoned is not certain. But do you remember when an automobile manufacturer, desperately seeking young customers, plaintively promised that its cars were "not your father's Oldsmobile"? Do you remember Oldsmobiles?
As we move from blather-only to the blather and work stage of Our Little Project, we'll offer occasional war stories and entrepreneurial insights as a regular blog feature.
Although we took possession of our office space last week, today is the true "move-in" day. After a morning of phone work, we'll be picking up a U-Haul and making the rounds to the various homes, friends' offices and used furniture shops from which we're procuring our furniture, eventually wending our way to the office.
I'll allow a moment of pride in our bootstrapping here: On Thursday, we'll have fully functional office space in a nice location, furnished well enough that we'll be quite comfortable. (The only holdup right now is our DSL installation.) And as of Thursday, we'll have spent a total of $531 on facilities and equipment. And a good chunk of that is the commercial insurance required by our lease. That also includes estimated rental on the U-Haul. To be fair, there will be install bills to come later from SBC, but I still think that's pretty good.
We couldn't have done it without the kindness of some of our true friends and associates. I think we'll be saying that a lot in the next few months.
Just last week, I was cautioning one of my partners about aligning us too closely with the blogging movement, because blogs are but one part of our plan -- and much of our content will be more tradiitional journalism, turbocharged with blogging's best features.
But I'd be remiss in not pointing our BusinessWeek's cover story on blogging and the similarity of their conclusions to much of what we're planning:
Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper.
The printing press set the model for mass media. A lucky handful owns the publishing machinery and controls the information. Whether at newspapers or global manufacturing giants, they decide what the masses will learn. This elite still holds sway at most companies. You know them. They generally park in sheltered spaces, have longer rides on elevators, and avoid the cafeteria. They keep the secrets safe and coif the company's message. Then they distribute it -- usually on a need-to-know basis -- to customers, employees, investors, and the press.
That's the world of mass media, and the blogs are turning it on its head. Set up a free account at Blogger or other blog services, and you see right away that the cost of publishing has fallen practically to zero. Any dolt with a working computer and an Internet connection can become a blog publisher in the 10 minutes it takes to sign up...
How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.
Want to get it back? You never will, not entirely.
Change content, and inevitably you change advertising. And that's where it's hard to be an army of one:
Still, blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience. Advertisers desperate to reach us need to tap niches (because we get together only once a year to watch the Super Bowl). By piggybacking on blogs, they can start working that vast blogocafé, table by table. Smart ones will get feedback, links to individuals -- and their friends. That's every marketer's dream.
The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT ) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company.
Most excitingly, the BusinessWeek folk get the ramifications of putting true open-source journalism into play:
What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?
Think of the way we produce stories here. It's a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we're working on. It's a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.
If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what's wrong, what we're overlooking. In many ways, it's a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It's a discussion.
That's one of the inevitable first questions when we're talking up our business plan. When the question rolls out, you can tell that the expected answer involves the twenty-something digital natives.
But it's also older readers in the mold of Ken Ferree, the new President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting:
The problem for me is that I do the Internet news stuff all day long, so by the time I get to the Lehrer thing . . . it's slow. I don't always want to sit down and read Shakespeare, and Lehrer is akin to Shakespeare. Sometimes I really just want a People magazine, and often that is in the evening, after a hard day.
Another AP thought has been kicking around my head the past couple days -- Simon Waldman catches a nice bit in Tom Curley's speech:
Who is in control? The gadget makers? The search engines? The online and wireless networks that transport our digital content? Look closer and you’ll see the users themselves are the ones in control, and their demand is pretty clear: They want what they want when they want it. And therein lies our opportunity. All of us here today in the so-called “mainstream media” have the power — individually and cooperatively — to reclaim our relevance to modern audiences and to move news back to the center of the information universe….. It’s a world too sophisticated to be left to farms of servers and robots and business models built only on them.
This hearkens back to the recent discussion of scale: What I've seen in internet media, and particularly local internet media, time and time again, is the quest for a machine that you can turn on and let run itself whilst advertisers and readers naturally flock to it. That's what most people think of as scale.
Just won't happen. Ever. The trick is to create a technological system that enables humans to provide the right content, at the right time, to the right people -- in an economically scalable environment.
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