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

Missed opportunities

When I first started this blog, I had a short-lived gimmick called "What you missed in today's Dallas Morning News." I'd post something snarky about the silliness of the DMN's content that day. I had originally envisioned that as a feature for our print edition, but gave up on it altogether after awhile, because although there was no shortage of material, the joke was always the same:

Irrelevant content. Lack of local coverage.

Today's paper, though, inspired me to dust off the snark-ometer.

Front page story: Some experts say that voters care about local issues and that might effect their votes in the upcoming presidential election.

Stop the presses! Meanwhile the Frost-Sessions debate is relegated to an interior page of Metro.

Then, in the thumbs up/down section of the Editorial pages, we get this gem:

W stands for Whoopee
Good news for Texans and other Red Staters: An ABC News Primetime Live survey found that Republicans are happier with their sex lives than Democrats. Sure, some put-out Dems tried to cold-shower the poll, claiming that the randy right is simply too easily satisfied. Could be, but we're betting that Republican Romeos love the stereotype-smashing pleasure of the phrase, "Are you a conservative, or are you just happy to see me?"

Much has been made about improvements to the DMN editorial page under the regime of Keven Ann Willey, with substantial props also going out to Rod Dreher. I won't deny that I see more diversity of opinion on the page than was there a couple years ago; and they now occasionally take a half-assed stand as opposed to no stand at all. But there's still a dearth of edge and local opinion and there's still far too much over-qualification of every stand taken. I still know that when I talk to knowledgable local media people, they rank the editorial page, metro and the business section as our biggest opportunities to compete.

I don't know Willey and I've only met Dreher once, but I have read their stuff. My perception is that they'll never be able to create a great edit page under a Belo regime. When the mandate is "be better, but still be sure not to offend anyone," you get lame jokes like the Whoopee line above from people who are capable of so much more.

Which Benefactor?

Mark Cuban has a good post for entrepreneurs like us, a list of "don't do's" when looking for financing.

A lot of folks we've talked to about our concept have suggested Cuban as a go-to money guy, but he's not currently on our shortlist, for a variety of reasons:

One is that we're not currently soliciting financing. Our lawyer will be happy I said that.

That aside (and Cuban's derision of attention-getting tactics validates this), the primary reason is that we don't know him or anyone who immediately has his ear. We do, however, know or have first-degree separation from a lot of other people in our collective rolodexi. So, if we were raising money, those people would be more likely to listen and therefore would be a more efficient use of our attention.

For now.

Friday hodgepodge

I'm spending the afternoon at our Uptown bureau office to work on things that of more direct benefit to Peg than blogging. Here are some things to chew on until I resurface:

• Our snazzy new design will debut sometime between now and Monday. That'll mean readjusting your bookmarks, RSS feeds, et al. The three of you who have signed up for the mailing list will be SOL. But your eyes will thank us.
• Frontburner has lots of stuff on Belo layoffs.
• A new WAN report talks about successful online newspaper strategies. Launching against a powerful hometown incumbent doesn't make the list, but here's what does:
  • For example, the report includes 11 examples of content that people will pay for (sports results, personal health, personal security etc.) and four they won’t (news that doesn’t affect them, most politics, non-local events, the arts).
    
    It also includes a range of case studies about services that people will pay for:
    • Alerts concerning vital news, items for purchase such as houses, cars, bargains, and financial information that can be sent by e-mail or mobile text.
    • Archives of historical information relating to issues of particular interest.
    • Aggregation of content from different sources that would not be easily available to the general population.
    • Transactions that offer discounts are worth paying for, but most readers or users will expect the trader or website to cover the transaction costs, or commissions.
    • Intelligent search that enables users to dig deeper faster, rather than having to trawl through secondary content.

Filtered, pure as a mountain stream

Dave Morgan has a nice column on ad models that helped me refine the description of ours -- it's not about parsing the data to help marketers target demographics; it's about filtering so that users get ads that are relevant and useful.

'Tis a fine distinction, but very meaningful. It's the difference between tolerating ads that aren't too annoying and viewing them as content.

People like content.

Revolution, or conventional wisdom?

Don't know how I missed this one.

J. Stewart Bryan III, chairman and chief executive of Media General Inc. in Richmond, Va., agreed, and told his fellow publishers, "our future has to be trying to broaden the distribution of the local information that we put out to people, and by broadening it, I mean multimedia."

"We have to be providers of news and information to people in any form that they want it, whether it's wireless, internet, print or broadcast," Bryan said.

Walter E. Hussman, president of WEHCO Media Inc. in Little Rock, Ark., also cautioned that newspapers need to provide different kinds of stories to go along with the e-mail, pager and Internet versions. "The next day's coverage needs to be a lot longer on context than just reporting the event," he said.

Interestingly, none of the megacorps are quoted on this stuff. When I worked in city magazines, my experience was that the people in smaller markets catch on to these things first. That's all the more reason for us to start in the bigger markets.