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.

SEO tips for online news

Another post to save to your bookmarks: Knight Digital Media Center has an article about the Top 10 search engine optimization tips for online news startups.

A reporter's worst nightmare

If not the worst, then close to it: According to one irate journalist, when the New York Times incorporated the former site of the International Herald Tribune with its own, it erased the IHT archives. And along with it, at least one journalist’s entire output:

Thomas Crampton writes:

1- Every one of the links ever made to IHT stories now points back to the generic NY Times global front page.

2- Even when I go to the NY Times global page, I cannot find my articles. In other words, my entire journalistic career at the IHT – from war zones to SARS wards – has been erased.

If print is dead, we're all at the wake

If you believe the estimates of Martin Langeveld, print is outdrawing websites by a country mile:

All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

 Not that Langeveld is advocating a contrarian’s course of action in response to the “death of print” meme:

The fact remains, of course, that not only is online revenue alone insufficient to sustain news operations, but the print operations of our larger newspapers, having lost most monopoly pricing power, are not sustainable either, recession or no recession.  Finding a solution for these industry problems demands careful monitoring of where the audience is actually spending its time and attention.  While the audience’s online attention seems to be a surprisingly low 3 percent, online is clearly where the audience is migrating to.  In my mind, as I’ve written pretty consistently since last September, the solution is an online-print hybrid in which print is consolidated to one, two or three editions per week, not seven.

Q&A with SeattlePI.com's Michelle Nicolosi a must-read

Michelle Nicolosi, executive producer of the new SeattlePI, offers some great insight into the direction of the former Post-Intelligencer’s new online endeavor.

Nicolosi talks with Content Bridges about news sites that she goes to for inspiration (The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald),  partner content for PI, it’s impressive resource of Reader Blogs, and much more. Here’s Nicolosi on:

MinnPost and the cult of personality

Take a cue from MinnPost, whose Web traffic is up. Way up. The secret? Having the same writers write a lot:

“I’d say the most dramatic thing we learned was that having regular writers writing very frequently has a huge impact on traffic,” says [MinnPost founder Joel] Kramer. “Having interesting, lively content with a lot of frequency by the same writers, that’s really what’s made the most difference. …

… “When we launched we had no full-time staff or contract writers,” says Kramer. “It was 100 percent freelance by-the-piece. Now the substantial majority of the site is written either by staff writers or contract writers.”

This isn’t surprising. Some news execs and their webmasters will tell you content is content: people don’t care where it comes from. Maybe that’s true for certain niche sites or sites that aggregate general news items, but from personal experience, I’ve found that I’m more likely to bookmark a website if there’s a particular writer whose style and content I look forward to reading. More about the increase in page views:

Social media, online news hubs and Nielsen ratings

As news sites turn to more localized coverage, will readers choose to get their news from general news sources such as the New York Times, or will they turn to specialty websites? That’s just one of the issues raised in Joshua Benton’s video interview with author James Hamilton today at Nieman Journalism Lab.

Hamilton, who wrote All the News That’s Fit to Sell, also discusses how TV news stations use Nielsen ratings data to influence the stories it covers, and how social media informs the types of issues journalists write about.

The best online news on the Web

At Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts lists his picks for the best examples of online media from traditional news organizations and small startups. Among his choices, these are the sites that I found particularly well done, appealing for their clean design, quality content and clarity of purpose.

Map-based:

CinciNavigator

LocalExplorer (Washington Post)

TimeSpace: World (Washington Post)

Local focus:

Organizing the online newsroom

Gina Chen at Save the Media offers the second part of “What’s an online-first newsroom.” A few highlights of Chen’s recommendations:

• The best of the Web should come back to print
• Fellow reporters should follow each other on Twitter to cross-post tweets
• Traditional walls between editorial departments need to come down so that reporters can work together for the benefit of readers
• More writers than a traditional newsroom
• Organize the website along topics
• A thoroughly revamped print product

Heard it through the Newsvine

Mark Briggs at Journalism 2.0 runs down a list of news companies that he says “offer a glimpse of toward a sustainable future for journalism.” One of the more interesting of these is Newsvine, which seeds its site with content contributed by its users.

The vast majority of that content, based on my visit, is from other news sources. Another interesting note: Newsvine claims it doesn’t employ any editors. Instead, the placement of stories is based on votes by readers, to come up with a popularity score.