A (hopefully) anticlimactic bit of housekeeping: Our Little Venture has moved beyond the stealth phase, as four of our key leaders are now full-time Pegasi. We’ve actually been "out of the closet" for about a month, but haven’t really been sure how to de-stealthify without making an unduly big deal out of it.

In fact, lacking any other clear reason to name names, we were thinking about trucking along as-is, just not taking any pains to hide our identities. (Mine, for instance, is easily found in a Google search.)

But I was chatting wedia with Dan Gillmor the other day, and he convinced me that it was important that everyone know who we are, even if we’re quite sure that no one knows "who we are." Something to do with that whole open-source and transparency thing we’ve been preaching.

So, here are the folks who are currently full-time engaged in our project. We’ll announce other members of our team as appropriate:

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So, several months ago, I started hearing folks — non-media-savvy folks, mind you — asking why newspapers couldn’t be more precise in their ad pricing.

Why can’t you charge the same way Google does, where I only pay for the clicks?

The demand was for something tangible and precise, something that couldn’t be fudged.

Or could it?

If only there was an even more precise metric. Hmm…

Having capriciously recommended it to a couple of our team members, I’m finally getting around to reading Michael Wolff’s Autumn of the Moguls, in anticipation of a talk he’s giving in Dallas later this month.

My wife just handed me an article he wrote for last month’s Vanity Fair (not online). Although it’s about the fall of network evening news, there was one passage that I found somewhat germane to Our Little Venture:

News, in anything but its most rarified form, was only ever commercial, local, cranky, ill-informed, cheap. Network news, on the other hand, established in the mid-50s was grand, Olympian, internationalist,  fair-minded, expensive (really expensive) — and for everybody.