Pegasus News provides a good model for going local

Lots to like about the neighborhood-centric focus of Pegasus News: a useful and user-friendly site, with interactive maps for categories like homes, garage sales and drink specials (to name just a very few) for the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.

While speaking with Matthew Sollars of News Innovation, Pegasus founder Mike Orren explained the business model behind his ambitious venture and explained why going hyperlocal isn’t enough:

You’ve got to have the hyperlocal neighborhood information in the context of what’s going on in the larger market. There is such a finite universe of people in a specific neighborhood that care enough to go out of their way to look for information and news about where they live, that universe is not enough to sell advertisers. But if you can put that in the context of ‘where am I going to go eat tonight, what’s going on locally in niche areas of interest that I have,’ that’s an opportunity to bring a lot more people into the fold. Then when you put neighborhood information in front of them they’re more likely to engage with it.

Another feature I really like about Pegasus is its commitment to value-added advertising for businesses: direct marketing, highly targeted e-mail blasts and geo-located mobile ads via an iPhone app that Pegasus developed itself.

To provide its news content, Pegasus maintains an impressive roster of contributors, and links to major news sources like the Ft. Worth Star Telegram and  The Dallas Morning News. The next step, if I’m the online producer, would be to add a social networking function that harnesses the power of the site’s 500,000 unique visitors each month and helps build the brand as an indispensable source of news and information.

Build your community, not numbers

While it’s easy to spot the news outlets that, desperate to survive in the new media ecosystem, stray outside their local focus and engage in an obvious grab for page views, others have realized they must expand their concept of business operations and provide the communities they serve something of value.

And blogging about whatever’s hot in Google Trends isn’t it — that’s just  playing a short-sighted and pointless numbers game. Sure, a site may see a spike in traffic because a blogger made sure to put up a post about whatever was most popular in Google search that day. But to what end? How long until advertisers see the stats for themselves and discover that they aren’t getting the click-throughs those misleading numbers promised, that all those eyeballs were a just an ephemeral occurrence?

WestSeattleBlog.com tries to build a relationship with local businesses by providing free seminars. Men’s Health offers an iPhone app that users can purchase in order to buy its Workouts. While the The Seattle Courant didn’t have the capital to make good on its ambitious vision, its business strategy is worth filing away for future reference:

Does your newsroom know its community?

Take about a minute and look at Mark Glaser’s 10 steps to saving newspapers in the digital age (via CyberJournalist). And then take note that the thread running through each of these steps isn’t about cutting costs as much as it is about being innovative in the effort to engage the local community.

Because I’m a good netizen, I won’t reprint the short post here and deprive CyberJournalist of the traffic, but I will say that Glaser is right on target in telling news sites to focus on what businesses want, rather than viewing them as an endless source of advertising dollars. And his recommendation to engage the community in face-to-face meetings recalls Gina Chen’s fine Save the Media post on how journalists can create communities of readers.

How Google Wave, wikis and the Web could reshape the news

Jeff Jarvis often encourages his readers to think about news in the Web ecosystem as a “process,” rather than as a product. Commenting on the preview of Google Wave, Jarvis expands on that idea:

In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.

Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.

Jarvis’ point about the collaborative nature of future news is echoed by Paul Gillin, writing for Newspaper Death Watch:

Thoughts on journalism's future

Martin Langeveld took notes during a think tank in Washington, D.C. called “The Future of Context.” For the occasional wonky speak about “future-pointed contextual journalism” and “ecosystems,” here are a few observations/commentaries that struck me as fruitful for the future viability of the news industry:

• Advertisers can add context: blogs, newsletter to engage customers in conversation.

• Commenting needs to evolve into conversation.  This can be done by having reporters and editors step in, add context, ask questions, and moderate the discussion flow.

• It’s not the race to be first that counts — its who can become the convenor of the conversation around the story, and can make that conversation solution-oriented.  A collaborative beat blog is in fact a continuous conversation.  Again, we need to turn commenters into contributors and commenting into conversation.

• Radio has always been good at having conversations with its audience.  We are hardwired to learn best through conversations.  Newspapers in the past couldn’t tap into conversations very well, but now we can.  By focusing energy on making people part of the conversation and building community, we raise demand for our product.  (Steve Yelvington, Cox)

Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks

Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer lambastes newspapers for living in an “echo chamber,” failing to “adapt their business models,” and makes note of that “perfect storm” that has so many journalists bemoaning the fate of their industry. Criticisms that should sound more than a little echo chamber-ish to anyone who’s been following the pontifications about the newspaper industry.

Megan Garber (who’s awesome, btw), respectfully summarizes Lerer’s talk at Columbia University, where he prescribed the same vague calls to innovation that Clay Shirky wrote about a month ago (nothing will work, everything will work). But after initially bristling at Lerer’s generalized recommendations, upon reflection I realize he’s probably right. Now is the time for experimentation:

Lerer (after noting the usual caveats: that there’s no silver bullet to rectify journalism’s woes, and that “no one knows what the future will look like”) pointed to innovation—and hasty innovation, at that—as a necessity for newspapers and other news outlets. We need to “embrace disruptive innovation,” he said. …

A True/Slant on ad revenue

In the Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg looks at True/Slant, a new Web journalism enterprise with an interesting revenue model. First, the journalism side:

It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.

The initial group of contributors includes current or former writers for publications such as the Financial Times, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Time magazine and the Boston Globe.

Now about that rather unique revenue model:

True/Slant will run regular Web ads throughout. But, in a highly unusual move, the site plans to offer advertisers their own entire pages where they can run blogs and try to attract a network of followers. These will have the same design and features of the journalists’ pages, but will be labeled as ad content.

An easy way to map your community

Dan Gillmor and Arizona State University journalism students used the power of GPS, smart phones and Flickr to assemble a map (in real time) of Phoenix’s “First Friday Art Walk.”

Gillmor explains how easy it was to put together what looks like a valuable community resource, using technology that offers opportunities for civic journalism and crowdsourcing:

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

Saved searches come to Twitter

Good news if you’ve discovered the power of using Twitter to work on stories.

Beatblogging reports that Twitter has now developed a Web interface allowing users to save their searches.

Social networking class at Poynter

Just a quick alert: Poynter Institute will be hosting a live webinar called Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web. Paul Gillin, a content marketing consultant, will lead this virtual class, which will explain:

• Why online “friends” are the foundation of social networks’ appeal
• How trusted sources are migrating from mass media to friends’ networks
• From examples of news organizations that are leveraging social networks to extend their influence
• What newspapers can do right now to tap into emerging communities

The webinar is scheduled for April 14, 2-3 p.m. The cost is $24.95.