One of the things we worked on the past couple of days was the "branding": stuff like logo, typefaces, etc. In the process, we discovered some serendipity in the naming of our little enterprise.
I’ll confess that when I first dubbed us "Pegasus News," it was more for need of "a name" than "the name." Pegasus is the closest thing Dallas has to a civic symbol, and I’ve got some personal affinity for the image because of a magazine cover I helped design in the early days of the re-relaunch of D Magazine. My old office overlooked Pegasus Plaza and had signage for Pegasus Credit Union. It lived at the front of my brain, so I used the name. (Interestingly, I’ve found that the name often resonates more with out-of-state colleagues who don’t get the Dallas connection.)
A couple things have come out in this process that have cemented my belief in the name.
One was a reading of The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes. Pegasus is one of the authors’ examples of a strong brand archetype, and is even featured on the cover. Even better, part of the archetypal association is of Pegasus as an enabler of heroism, rather than being the hero himself.
Rather, Pegasus helped Perseus and Bellerophon kick ass.
Another decision that’s come along in the past few days is our name for the feature that feeds you relevant content (both news and advertising) based upon your implicit and explicit preferences. Colloquially, we’d adopted "The Daily Me," but we’ve now gone to "The Daily You."
"The Daily Me" is a term I learned from JD Lasica and Jay Small, and was coined, I think, by Nicholas Negroponte. And it’s a good term. We’re going with "The Daily You," partly because the "My" phenomenon online (My Yahoo!, My YPO, My ____), has become a bit o’er-ubiquitous. And, it’s a bit disingenuous, indicating that the reader made the news themselves. While some may be that engaged, most are not. To us, the you sounds more like we’re serving "you," which is more on point.
Or that could be a big fat rationalization for the fact that one URL was available and the other wasn’t.
In any event, we’re going to start with "The Daily You." Our hope is that if we do a good enough job, it will engage you more deeply in your community, while filtering enough noise to give you enough bandwidth to join us in creating "The Daily We."
