In which my cynicism about Dallas County taxes is proven at least partially wrong

By Mike Orren

When April showed me the new-form Dallas County property tax statement we received this week, every one of my conspiracy-theory alarm bells went off. Instead of the usual envelope chock full of data and comparisons to prior years, it was a tiny postcard that told us what we owed; that the County had saved a precise $26,318 by going this route; and a myriad number of ways we could dig up the info that was in the old reports.

I was enraged -- obviously, this was an attempt to obscure the faux tax increase that Texas Counties love to pull by raising the estimated value of your property and not the rate of your taxes. I seethed as I went online, relishing my upcoming performance at the DCAD offices and mentally writing my award-winning expose on how Dallas County was trying to pull a fast one...

But then, as I pulled up the report from Dallas County -- a report that was less difficult to find than I would have imagined -- I discovered that they'd dropped our home value by 5% year-over-year and that our tax payment had actually decreased.

Apparently economic realities have caught up even with tax appraisers. So now I have to wonder, how will our cash-strapped schools and public works be impacted by the $152 less they're getting from me this year?

November 7, 2009

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Holly in Dallas turns red in October

By Teresa Gubbins

Every fall, I notice too late that the holly bush berries around Dallas have turned red right under my nose. Holly wreaths are a big Christmas-season item so it makes sense the berries would be red by then, but one likes to notice when-exactly things like the turning of berries from green to red occur.

After a super-vigilant watch in 2009, I can report the following:

1. The berries first started losing their kelly-green-ness on Wednesday October 14.

2. By the weekend of October 17, three days later, the green started taking acquiring a hint of yellow-orange.

3. By early November, few berries are still green. (See photo above.) Some are hinting at solid redness, some are warming up to red with a brick-rust tint, while others are a transitional yellow-ish.

Update on full red status TK!

November 5, 2009

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Reality show sellers looking for lonely lovely legal lasses

By Mike Orren

Some of you may remember that in my last life I ran a legal ledger known as Texas Lawyer. I still hear some of the buzz in that community, so I've repeatedly been hit today with the solicitation going around for a proposed reality show called The Single Law Ladies of Dallas.

The pitch is that five un-hitched lady lawyers get followed around as they work together to try to find Mr. Right (Now while the cameras are rolling) and get special advice sessions with authors of relationship books.

The producers are telling the ladies that they haven't pitched it to a network yet, because they want to do so with the cast in place. Some of the folks involved have worked on Survivor, and BCII has gotten shows on TLC, SPEED, HGTV, DIY and the history channel, albeit with more macho fare like King of the Cage and Overhaulin'.

You can see the pitch below. I'm not posting the producer's contact info without hearing from them, but if you fit the profile, let me know and I'll pass it along.

(And no, I don't know why this got me all silly with alliteration.)

November 4, 2009

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Favoriting contest: The Pogues / Justin Townes Earle at House of Blues Friday

By Mike Orren

This is going to be a quick one -- We've been graced with five pair of tickets to see The Pogues and Justin Townes Earle at the House of Blues tomorrow night.

Yup, the Pogues are back and it is the full original lineup. They've been getting strong reviews on this tour -- far better than their first reunion a couple years back.

Enter the contest by going to the show page on our site and clicking the "Add to favorites" link (requires free / easy / painless registration and login).

We'll pick winners tomorrow morning: Be sure to watch your email for notification of a win because we'll need to collect your name to give HOB for the guestlist.

While you're clicking, here's a clip from last night's show at Stubb's in Austin:

October 29, 2009

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Candy corn throwdown

By Teresa Gubbins

Candy corn turns out to be a more controversial topic than you might think. At the very least, it has swept the local food blog world: Is it any good? What should you pair it with? And Nancy is a Snicker bar.

One loveshates to be a know-it-all, but if you want to talk candy corn, you have to hit Central Market, who stock a large variety that starts at Halloween and extends to Christmas. Their product borders on artisanal; it's specially made by a family-run company in Indiana called Zachary Confections (photo of their production line is at right), with flavors that run from a minty peppermint to the irresistible gingerbread.

Hey, this is fun. Maybe we should get all the local food blogs to post simultaneously on other topics, like the situation with independent farmers markets. Maybe urge the city of Dallas to encourage, rather than stifle, their growth. Just a thought.

October 29, 2009

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Last-minute Halloween ticket price drop

By Mike Orren

Just so you know: We've dropped the prices on our remaining haunted house tickets so we can blast the last few out the door quickly and get on with creating our Halloween costumes.

Most of the tickets are > 70% off. The big package is now 80% off. Buy now!

October 26, 2009

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Redesign preview: What we're trying to do

By Mike Orren

Change is hard. People generally fear change, particularly when that change represents an unknown. You can see some of that in the comments on my announcement post from Thursday, although it's so far frankly more supportive and positive than I dared expect.

Still, I thought it might help to explain what we're trying to do in the redesign, and hopefully assuage some of the fears about the new direction. When we sat down to work on this, these were are goals:

• Accentuate the positive: When we originally spec-ed out Pegasus News we thought we were trying to be the second coming of the Dallas Times-Herald. As such, the architecture of the site and its look and feel were that of a traditional newspaper website. As time has gone on, we've realized that we're still a long way from being able to afford complete original newsgathering of the level of a metro daily. At the same time, most users who hit our site for the first time, usually through a Google search, don't see the unparalleled wealth of databased info (events, drink specials, schools, government bodies) and arts/dining/entertainment coverage that is so far our strongest suit. So in a way, we've inverted the thinking: Instead of a news site with great actionable databases, we're a database-driven arts and entertainment site with news. It also means that the voice and attitude of the site that so many have cited as a strength must at least stay intact, if not further accentuated.
• Bust the myths: After reading through a dozen original pieces written by our staff in a given day, plus the work of our more than 100 content partners, it's hard for us to hear the popular but unfair criticism that we're "just an aggregator." That's a misperception that can get created by the quick flow of the masses of content on the site, and the fact that in any given few hours the balance may swing one way or the other. So we wanted to make the "good stuff" live longer and be more visible, while maintaining our goal of keeping you abreast of the basics of the watercooler news of the day.
• Make the complexity evident by simplifying: As one commenter pointed out, we have a lot of databases. The trouble is that in many cases, we have so much data, over so many interlinking categories that it can be hard to understand just what's in there, much less how to find what you're looking for. Case in point: We currently have over 2,100 local bands on the site. And the page that list them is utterly useless. People engage with band profiles via events, but there's not currently a useful way to browse. Another: We have a ridiculous amount of data in our restaurant listings, but by hitting you over the head with such arcane (but awesome) things as whether a place has Golden Tee Golf, the search interface is really daunting. So we've done a lot of things to surface the information that you've told us is most useful; make it more browsable and searchable; and then give you the extra details only when you want them.
• Get more people to stay: It's no secret that we get a lot of visitors every month and that a lot of them come in because our site is built in a way that is friendly to the search engines. The trouble is that we always want more of those people to become regulars, but it is hard to communicate on a first pageview why a busy browser should stick around. So we've tried to do a better job of communicating what's different and relevant on every page, while not dumbing things down for the regulars. In some cases (like the homepage) it means a different styling for different people. In most, it means leveraging our databases to show you even more relevant content that might just convince you to make that extra click.
• Get more people to register: We don't believe in forcing people to register for user accounts just to read. That means that we have to provide enough compelling reasons for people to register (which I think we do) and communicate those well (which we don't). One of our most important metrics of success on the redesign and ongoing iterations is the percent of visitors who register for an account.
• Get more people using the Daily You: This is an adjunct to registration, but an important one. Many of you have told us that The Daily You is one of the most compelling features of the site. And, candidly, our best way of helping advertisers. It gets better for everyone, providing smarter results and deeper customization, the more it is used. We want to accelerate its growth and accuracy -- and the only way to do that is to get more registered users on the site more often.
• Find better ways of getting advertiser messages to the right people at the right time: From the first draft of my business plan, one of the primary goals of Our Little Business was finding an answer to the broken model of traditional advertising. And while we've made some strides in that area, even when we're super-targeting, we're still doing so through the somewhat traditional means of banner ads. And while those (and the occasional flash ad) are still the primary means that are a.) available and b.) widely accepted by advertisers -- we're still trying to find better ways of delivering the message. So we've tried to generate some creative solution, whether through relevant text cues or other ways to advertise outside the traditional banner construct. I know that there are users who aren't happy with some of the ad units we've been running lately -- but we have to keep the lights on, and the only way we can weed out those sorts of ads is by creating other types that outperform them.
• Make it prettier: I'm not afraid to admit it: My baby is ugly. The site was designed in 2004 and looks like it was designed in 1998. (That's no offense to the original designer: He just wasn't given time or latitude to do it right. That's not for a lack of care, but for never having the financial resources at the right time to do something about it. Now that the opportunity is here, we're trying to make something as modern, elegant and unique as we hope our service is.
• Fix stuff that was broken: For all the innovations on the site, there are some things that have never worked very well. Great example: Our site search. It's an open-source search that was built in the early 2000's and never updated. We who use the site every day have learned workarounds, but that doesn't help the average user. So, we've completely rebuilt and retuned the search function and included more sorting parameters and visual cues to help you find what you want. There are all manner of other little bugs that have been biting us for years that we'd put off fixing because they involved major rewiring. Our dev team has written and re-written more lines of code in the last six months than we've written in our entire existence so that we can address those problems
• Replicate it: While we've always envisioned Our Little Business serving other cities, it's only now becoming a reality. That requires some shifts in thinking: Things that are held together with spit and bubblegum for one site will break with five. Inefficiencies that we could deal with on one site are untenable in a network. For instance, in a case of the cobbler's children lacking shoes, we've long lamented that our system requires us to upload one photo at a time, even for a large gallery. To increase the visuals here and add other sites, we had to build not just a bulk uploader, but one that played nicely with our databases. There are lots of little examples of things we've done to make things more efficient so we can do more.

So that's the thinking behind the redesign. In the next post, I'll start showing some of the goods.

October 24, 2009

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Redesign preview: A rose by any other name...

By Mike Orren

We've been talking about a planned redesign of Pegasus News for some time - first reference I can find is from back in February. We're in the homestretch now, as Frontburner noted this morning, so I figured I'd go ahead and start previewing some of the good stuff we're working on -- lest we get scooped further on our own transmogrification.

But first, some backstory and explanation: Our original (and existing) design was put together in a hurried couple days with a designer as we were rushing to launch TexasGigs. Everything we've done since then has just been tacked on to that like a spoiler onto a Hyundai. So while the function of the site was really thoroughly thought out, the design never was -- meaning that it was our weakest suit, making many of our coolest features hard to find.

Then, when we were purchased by the digital arm of GAP Broadcasting at the end of last year, it quickly became clear that our longtime plan of moving beyond Dallas / Fort Worth would come to fruition and that we would start with markets where we have radio stations.

This spring, we started working on a redesign that we thought would be a really extensive paint job. But some of the great ideas that came out in the planning process turned out or require us cutting some new windows -- and damned if some those weren't load-bearing walls. That means we've had to take time to do a pretty thorough revamp on both sides of the hood. We've kept everything intact, while adding a lot of cool extras. I'll preview some of those here over the next few weeks leading up to the relaunch.

With the imminent addition of other cities, we had to face something that's been looming over us for a long time: Our name.

I've long said that the name Pegasus News is the biggest mistake I made in our early days. Why a mistake?

• I consider it an indictment of our education system, but the vast majority of people cannot spell "Pegasus."



• People always shorten it to "Pegasus," causing people to think our website is at Pegasus.com.



• It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue



• The "News" part is also problematic. While we certainly cover a fair amount of news, we're much stronger in and much more recognized for arts and entertainment coverage and our databases. It doesn't emphasize what we're best at.



• I originally chose "Pegasus" because of its affiliation with Dallas. That doesn't make so much sense outside the area. And frankly, I don't encounter that many people who get the connection between Pegasus and Dallas as it is.

That last point meant that our new sites would certainly need a different name. And as I saw how different (and better) the redesign looked, I knew that this was our last chance to make a name shift on our original, flagship Dallas / Fort Worth site. At the tail end of a long planning meeting, I spoke up and told the group that I thought we should make the change. This brought a ginormous sigh of relief from the whole party, whom I'm sure had been drawing straws to see who would get stuck with the duty of trying to convince me to change the name of this site.

So, in a few weeks, you'll find the same Pegasus News with a new skin and a new name: WiredLocal.

We chose the name WiredLocal because we wanted something that would work equally well anywhere and that simply reinforced the way we try to connect you to your community. And because the domain name was available.

When you come to the site, if we know where you are, you can get right to business. If not, you'll pick your area once and we'll remember your preference.

For sentimental reasons, I'll find a way to keep the Pegasus name alive on the new site, most likely through the blog.

To clear up some confusion I saw in a Frontburner comment, as we add sites, they will all be distinct sites, not one big sprawling megalopolis. DFW.WiredLocal.com will be a totally different site from othercityname.WiredLocal.com.

Once we launch the redesign here, we'll be quickly launching in Shreveport / Bossier City; then in Tyler / Longview and then in other places to be named later. So if you have friends in those cities, tell them to look for us.

So, it's only appropriate that the first thing we preview is the logo, and the way we're using it on the new site(s). It is drivers-license inspired and will display both your username and avatar, in an attempt to reinforce the way we customize things via The Daily You:

Stay tuned-- more preview to come...

One funny side note: I appreciate Sarah B. being so cagey in keeping the name under wraps when talking to the Frontburner, but I'm truly shocked that it's gone this far without a leak. Our sales team has been talking this up for a couple months, and anyone who's gone to an event at the Eisemann Center could have guessed, as we have the name (and an earlier rendition of the logo) on the backs of all their tickets as part of a sponsorship deal. We thought we'd be live before the tickets came out, and my SNAFU on that has led us to be a little quieter on the marketing front while we pulled everything together. Expect some noise as we make the shift.

October 22, 2009

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Favoriting contest: Dallas Opera's Otello

By Mike Orren

Told you we were going on another hot run of contests. This one's for one of two pair of tickets for box seats to the Thursday, November 5 performance of Otello at the brand-spanking new Winspear Opera House:

It promises to be the season opener of the century: Renowned tenor Clifton Forbis, Georgian baritone Lado Ataneli and acclaimed French soprano Alexandra Deshorties - making her role debut as Desdemona - in a new production of Verdi's 1887 masterpiece chosen to inaugurate the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House at the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts

You know the drill: Go to the show page and click on "Add to favorites" (requires free / easy / painless registration and login). On November 1, we'll draw two winners from those who favorited, giving each a pair of tickets to the show.

We'll email the winners and get your names to add to the list for Will Call. Failing to enter would be, dare I say, a tragedy?

October 19, 2009

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Favoriting contest: Contemporary Ballet Dallas "Breaking | Through"

By Mike Orren

We've been quiet on the contesting for a bit, but we have a bunch of new ones coming through in the next little bit. First up: Contemporary Ballet Dallas' season premiere, "Breaking Through," at the Lakewood Theater on Thursday, October 29th.

Here's what to expect:

The company’s season premiere will present audience favorites and original works by local choreographers. Combining myriad dance forms to create CBD’s signature contemporary style, the concert promises an eclectic evening of dance and music.

Valerie Shelton Tabor restages “Leave Her...Loving,” set to a musical collage by Dave Matthews Band. The piece follows a struggling relationship and the emotional breakthroughs each character undergoes. The evening also includes an audience favorite – “Rights of Survivorship” – a tribute to breast cancer awareness and survival. The piece is set to the familiar and intimate sounds of Collective Soul.

CBD assistant artistic director, Lindsay Bowman, gets the adrenaline flowing with “Higher Ground,” a high-energy duet set to music from The Red Hot Chili Peppers. And lastly, CBD will premiere Ms. Bowman’s “Come Back to Me,” set to the inimitable sounds of rising star David Cook.

How to enter? In case you're new here or have forgotten, it goes like this:

Go to the show page and click on "Add to favorites" (requires free / easy / painless registration and login). On Friday, we'll draw two winners from those who favorited, giving each a pair of tickets to the show.

If you enter, be watching for an email notifying you of a win and respond quickly -- these are paper tickets that we can mail or have you pick up. But we'll need a quick response.

Good luck!

October 19, 2009

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