Pegasus News

» see pegasusnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Pegasus News launched in December 2006 and did several things every news site does now. You told it where you lived and what you cared about and the front page rearranged itself around that. It pulled stories from partner blogs across the Metroplex instead of pretending to be the only source in town. Advertising and editorial lived inside one content management system, so an ad could be sold against a neighborhood rather than a section. Mike Orren founded it, under a company called PanLocal Media.

In 2008 it won a Katie Award from the Press Club of Dallas and an Eppy from Editor & Publisher for best website.

The ownership then went through three hands. Fisher Communications, a Seattle television group, bought it in 2007 and said it would put the Pegasus model behind its own stations' sites. Gap Communications, a mid-market radio company, took it in 2009 in a deal the Dallas Morning News reported at $1.5 million for the parent. The Dallas Morning News itself bought it in July 2012.

Wikipedia says it shut down in February 2014, and that is the date of the news story rather than the death. CultureMap Dallas reported on 25 February, from two sources who would not be named, that the plug was about to be pulled and a relaunch was a week or two out. The site was still publishing on 3 March, and the archive's last full homepage is 4 March 2014. By the 22nd, pegasusnews.com served a single orange page with a three-second meta refresh aimed at guidelive.com.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the zip code ~

The personalization is the part worth remembering, because it was 2006 and it was being done by a startup in Dallas rather than by a platform with a research division. You gave the site your zip code and it gave you a paper about your part of town. EveryBlock did not launch until 2008. The Brooklyn equivalent, Outside.in, started the same year Pegasus did and took venture money to get there.

None of this was ever going to reach me in Ankara, and the mechanism is the reason it is in this list anyway. Pegasus News also had a database editor, which is a job title that has mostly stopped existing. Todd Maternowski kept the concert and event listings current, and when the end came CultureMap called that work "the site's bedrock". He was let go with the rest.

~ the boxes ~

The farewell page deserves describing. It is a 529 by 600 pixel graphic on an orange background: a giant blue letter G with the Pegasus News wordmark projected across its face, half legible, standing next to a stack of cardboard moving boxes. Under that sits the GuideLive logo, then the line "PegasusNews has moved to GuideLive", then the Dallas Morning News masthead. You had three seconds to read all of it before the redirect fired.

~ the man who closed it twice ~

GuideLive did not last either. In August 2019 The Dallas Morning News redesigned, moved most of its brands behind the paywall and eliminated GuideLive, folding the coverage into a Things To Do section on dallasnews.com. The executive running that project described it as simply folding GuideLive's coverage into the main site to create a more streamlined user experience.

That executive was Mike Orren, by then the paper's chief product officer. He built Pegasus News and sold it to the Morning News. Eleven years later he switched off the brand his site had been folded into. guidelive.com redirects to the paper's arts and entertainment page today, and pegasusnews.com resolves to a Vultr address that answers nothing at all.

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