What the heck happened here?

"Meet the new site, same as the old site"

If you're reading this, chances are you are one of the thousands of loyal users of TexasGigs who have come to know and love the site. If you've read the blogs on our site, the changes you see here shouldn't surprise you too much, as we've been talking about this for almost a year.

Pegasus News, Inc. was formed in late 2004 with the goal of creating a hyperlocal news and information site that would provide customized content for everyone in the DFW area. And while that site was always intended to be broad in its coverage -- including neighborhood news, business, sports, schools, the arts and so forth -- we always knew that we wanted to have a killer music section.

Like many startups, it took us some time to find our legs, to build our team, to buy and build our technology and to find capital. By November of 2005, we'd succeeded on all but the last one. We were antsy, and wanted to show off what we could do. But, at the same time, we were committed to the idea that we wouldn't launch anything that couldn't be reasonably comprehensive. We looked down the list of tabs planned for the site (the ones you see above) and called an audible that music was the one thing we could handle. It was the section we were most passionate about, and was (we thought) one of the more finite.

We teamed up with the existing TexasGigs blog and relaunched the site in December of 2005. At the time we had a lot of conversations about naming the site, and decided to stick with the TexasGigs name, partly out of respect for the cred of that site, and partly because we didn't want to confuse people that Pegasus News was going to limit itself to music coverage only.

You probably know the rest. TexasGigs grew like a weed, filling a need in the large and robust DFW music community and winning some awards along the way. As of launch, we had more than 2,000 voluntarily registered users and were doing well over a million pageviews a month.

But today (December 1, 2006) , as we've been saying for some time, is the day that we expand to cover anything and everything that goes on here. And because of that breadth, it's time to switch the overall site to the Pegasus News brand. We cover some of the expected questions about this in the FAQ below, and will add to it as we hear others.

But let's be clear:

We are not abandoning the music community that has been so good to us over the past year.

We are not changing the way we cover music; the way we respond quickly to artists and fans; or the depth of coverage of all genres and all levels of local music.

No site features are going away.

TexasGigs is not going away. It is now a crucial part of a larger site.

We will, however, be using the lessons we've learned while running TexasGigs over the past year to inform our coverage of everything from politics, to arts, to business to neighborhood news. We hope you'll entrust us and engage with us in these areas the same way you have with music. And if you think for one second that we've dropped the ball, let us know immediately.

So where did TexasGigs go?

It hasn't gone anywhere. You can still click or type "texasgigs.com" and get to the main page of  TexasGigs. That page can also be reached via "pegasusnews.com/music." There is nothing music-related we've taken away from TexasGigs as it was. We did move the movies section out of TexasGigs, as it was always mostly unrelated to music.

Why didn't you keep TexasGigs as a separate site?

There are lots of reasons. The glue in everything we do is that it is local. And we think that when you are interested in what is happening and what you can do locally, a big part of that may be a single topic, like music.

But you are probably interested in lots of things -- and our site will weave those together in a unique way. At minimum, you'll be able to click around and get all kinds of local info on lots of topics. But, if you are (or become) a registered user, we can start automatically customizing your hub pages based on what you read all over the site with a tool we call The Daily You™. So to us, you're not a demographic -- you're a person.

You're not a "music person" or a "sports person." You may be a fan of hip-hop and bluegrass; who loves the Mavs but doesn't care beans for the Cowboys; who lives in McKinney; works in Downtown Dallas; and is really interested in crime news. We can customize to that level -- but only if everything is integrated into one site.

Secondly, we need your help -- The engaged, active community on TexasGigs is exactly what we've always envisioned for the larger site. We're hoping that you'll find your way into other parts of the site, and by example, help "train" new users coming for neighborhood news and politics on how we all interact as a community.

Also, we believe that the broader site will help us further serve and promote the local music community. We're all proud of TexasGigs as it is, but it is a site that really only caters to the passionate music fan. It's our hope that by picking up readers with other niche interests, we'll suck in some more of those "casual" music fans and expose them to more local music and get them buying tickets to shows.

What about all my bookmarks? I've been promoting my band page to people -- Do I need to change the URL?

No need to change anything. All your old urls will still work. Every url on the old site redirects and corresponds to the same page on the new site.

I use a TexasGigs banner to promote my band. Does it need to change?

No. We're still going to refer to TexasGigs as, well, TexasGigs. Sort of like how The Daily Newspaper calls its entertainment section GuideLive. Except cooler. 

Are you still going to keep updating all the concerts and band pages?

Absolutely.

I don't care about any kind of events but music. Will I have to scroll through a bunch of gallery openings and business speeches to find concerts?

Not unless you want to. If you click to "Shows" from the TexasGigs page, you'll see just concerts.

Will you still have all the songs and radio stations?

Again, yes. And hopefully a lot more listeners.

Are you going to stop doing news stories, interviews and video?

No way. In fact, because of our larger scope, we have more manpower and more techno-toys, so we plan to turn up our coverage in a couple of weeks once we regain our equilibrium post-launch.

Will it still go to eleven?

Hell yes.

I don't see the blogs.

Mike, Alan and Blair are now doing one unified blog, which you can find here. We decided that a lot of what we blogged about, particularly music, would be easier to find in a news story format. We'll still have the same voice, but we think that in general people want to find things more by topic than by author. And we were all over the map in terms of what we put in our blogs. To be honest, we've never been comfortable articulating the difference between a story and a blog post. And, we find it amusing that while some of our friends in the mainstream media are throwing up a blog a day, we're taking the voice and interaction of blogging and putting it into the searchable, categorizable structure of a more traditional news system. If you're looking for our writings on music, or any other local topic, you'll find them in the stories. The new Square Pegs Blog will be used when we want to write about our business, nonlocal topics, random silliness and good old fashioned navel-gazing. You can find the link to it on the homepage. And the archives of all of our individual blogs will live on.