Pegasus News in Dallas -- Other Aggregation/Community Services

[Brad King]

I met some of these folks (I think) at a SXSW Interactive party two years ago. I wasn't impressed at their initial presentation, but that may have been because we were crammed in the back of the Lucky Lounge (go there if you get a chance) and the music was bumping.

Pegasus News has been touted as one of the progressive modern journalist sites. There are some interesting features:

1) set your own home page
2) set your neighborhood address and get localized news
3) citizen contributions
4) an interesting search mechanism to find specific topics on the site

A Seattle company just purchased them -- which you can find out about in this article about the issues facing traditional news outlets.

I don't know much about them -- although I've been tooling through the site for a few.

Anyone have thoughts?

[Brad King]

I just spoke with Andrew, from Newsvetter, one of our esteemed members.

He mentioned that he's going to be talking with the folks at the SF Examiner, which I thought went out of business. Apparently, it's a location-based news aggregation service -- but there's no About Us section.

It appears to have 3 locations (Baltimore, DC and SF -- which is really like 2 locations) and it's being run, in part, by George Shirk, my former editor at Wired News.

When you log in, you get aggregated news from the location closest to you. In my case, apparently I'm from Louisville (pronounced correctly as Lou-UH-vole, if you were wondering, Coasties). That's not a great start, but it's neat that I get somewhat tailor information.

Am I missing a whole slew of news aggregation services and community journalism smashed together?

[Andrew]

Hey Brad, you should talk to your pal George Shirk (met with him today). Not only does the Examiner provide aggregated news based on location, but they also have local writers (some formally trained others not) who cover various areas of news (e.g., sports, crime, city hall, music, culture). Writers are paid based on number of views (which encourages writers to use social networks to promote their work). Both the newspaper and the site our owned by one media company but they've created two separate businesses i.e., no cross pollination.

Another site you should check out is everywheremag.com. Editor is Todd Lappin who you may know from Wired.com. It's a travel mag (already on issue 3) and online community where the content is all sourced from the public (including photos). They use technology to help evaluate the content and then choose the best for the mag. People who make it in the mag get $100 plus free sub.