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.
journalists everywhere in his post ”
