Upwardly, outwardly mobile

Rick Edmunds has a good overview of the Pegasus News, a new mobile service in Dallas-Fort Worth. Take a look at it here. At a glance, it seems to have a lot going for it: simplicity, phone-centric information including restaurants, events, movie times and bar happy hours. Users can add content as well. Check out Your Neighborhood and The Daily You.
With the growing popularity of mobile media, Pegasus seems like one model for news organizations who want to own mobile in their local markets. What’s your mobile strategy?

Let’s get local

Joe H. Bullard, a former managing editor of The Denver Post, wants to see more local news in the Denver newspapers. Here’s his formula from ”Getting local coverage in gear.”

“I’d fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I’d send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.

“I don’t want to see you in the newsroom, unless your editor or I summon you. I will count bylines. If you don’t submit at least one story a day, I will be unhappy. If you go a week without a byline, you will be fired. I will expect you to know how to use a digital camera and I expect you to submit at least one picture a day from your circle.

“Because all the reporters and editors are college graduates and have been making a good living for a good number of years, they all live in upscale portions of the metro area, which will limit the news that gets reported. This is a good thing because it would give me the opportunity to hire blue-collar reporters that care about what goes on in their neighborhoods.

“They would be much more concerned about why their Johnny can’t read and why his classroom has 39 kids, one teacher and no aide. Or why their street never gets swept, nor the snow removed. In short, we would start reporting news that is relevant to my readers.

“What do I do with all this news? Put it on my web site as a zone section.”

Is this an organizing principle for the future? Is your newsroom already doing something like this? Please share your experiences in comments.

(Thanks to Ryan Sholin for the pointer.)

Star-Telegram sports online

Successful online ventures identify and tap into community passions. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has created a megasite for high school sports and is riding a wave of popularly and building revenue. I asked Ellen Alfano, Deputy Executive Editor/Vice President for Online at the Star-Telegram about the site, www.dfwvarsity.com, and the result is this guest post:

By Ellen Alfano

High school football is more than a tradition in Texas - it is an integral part of our culture. The Star-Telegram devotes a lot of resources and space to Friday night football. So three years ago, the Sports department and IS department began working on a super web site that would connect us to those readers who are fanatical about “Friday Night Lights.”

We created a home page for every high school team that we cover - nearly 100 - and have continued to improve the functionality as well as the number of high school sports that are part of the site. The site includes team photos, results, statistics, schedules, recruiting updates, player information, message boards and score alerts, as well as blogs and interactive pages for uploading user generated photos and videos. We have expanded the concept to include girls and boys basketball, soccer, baseball, softball and volleyball.

The staff that produces the content for dfwVarsity is a small army of sports staffers, correspondents and employees from different areas of the newspaper. This is the same group that covers games for the newspaper, only they file for the Web site after each quarter of a game and immediately after the game is over. The only additional people we have devoted to this project are programmers. There were a few missteps along the way, most of them involving the programming.  We are currently working on the third version of the software and we have a web developer from IS working with a newsroom web developer to finish the newest version.

Anyone who is considering a site like this needs to have a project leader who understands sports and agate as well as web development. Developers who worked on the site but didn’t understand sports left us with a table structure that was not flexible enough to allow us to adapt it to additional sports.

The one area that has never been an issue is the popularity of dfwVarsity.com. The site had more than 3 millon page views last year. It has also been a revenue-producer from the beginning. We began with a sponsor who paid $12,000. This year we will produce almost $200,000 in revenue.

Last year’s dfwvarsity site, including the videos, brought in $5,000 a month in revenue. The video was not specifically targeted. We quickly realized that was too low. This year, the main sponsorship was sold to Chevrolet for $10,000 a month for 10 months

One feature of the site is a weekly video program during the football season that just won an Emmy. More about that program later this week.

Building an online community

Poynter Online’s E-Media Tidbits features a lively primer by Michelle Ferrier on the outreach she conducts as leader of MyTopiacafe.com, an online community of The Daytona Beach News-Journal. Ferrier writes:
“I’m often asked what a typical day is like as managing editor of an online community. I often respond, ‘What do you mean by ‘typical day’?’ Running a hyperlocal online community like MyTopiacafe.com is more like running a political campaign than an online news site. You must be the candidate, campaign manager and media relations coordinator all rolled into one.”
Ferrier makes speaking appearances and hits local community events to evangelize for the site, which also conducts fund-raisers for community causes.
She is one more journalist who is finding the fun at the intersection of journalism and social networks.