As Tom Maurstad pointed out in The Dallas Morning News the other day, celebrity couplings have become such big news that they have developed the equivalent of brand names. Bennifer (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner), TomKat (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), and so on and so on.

Tom came up with a few projected couplings that would make for great brand names; his best was Viggoria (Viggo Mortensen and Eva Longoria)– as in, “Viggoria’s Secret.”

I’ll add my own contribution: If Jessica Alba started dating Chow Yun-Fat, we could call them…..

FAT ALBA! (Rimshot!)

Whatever…Bill Cosby would think it was funny.

As the president of Pegasus News, Mike Orren, describes his company’s mission:

Pegasus News is a local news company that is reinventing the model of local market content and advertising.

Our beta test will take place in Dallas, Texas in late 2005. We will distribute content via a website, e-newsletters, RSS feeds, SMS messaging and any other medium we can think of. Except for carrier pigeons. They smell bad.

This blog is a diary of the evolution of our concepts; a buzz-builder; a beacon for like-minded media folk; and a way for us to communicate with our growing team.

To get a good idea of what this is all about, we recommend starting with the “Best of” links on the left side of this page. We talk about our key concepts on this blog, but (for obvious reasons) you’re not going to get the full business plan here. Our key differentiators are:

– Hyper-local content to the exclusion of all else.

– Rich delivery via as many mediums as possible.

– Subscription price predicated on level of engagement (higher engagement = lower price).

– Almost exclusively pay-for-performance advertising. Regardless of medium.

We encourage you to join the conversation by commenting on any post, or by emailing us.

A lifetime subscription is only $1 through Monday, Oct. 3. They take PayPal. G’head — do it.

The AP reports that party-girl Tara Reid henceforth would like to be known as actress Tara Reid.

“I think there must be a journalist school where students are taught how to kill Tara Reid,” the 29-year-old boo-hoos in the Oct. 12 Steppin’ Out magazine.

Of course, Tara blamed her publicist, who was canned. I’m sure with new representation, she’ll be bringing home Oscars annually. (Do the seat-warmers double as designated drivers?)

Here’s my suggestion: If Tara really wants to lose her party-girl rep, she doesn’t need to fire anybody. She could stay home on Friday night and blog. Extreme image makeover — done.

The media world has gone so ga-ga over blogs and wikis that now journalists are letting readers write their stories and advertisers are asking customers to supply their creative in return for prizes and/or recognition. For an example of the latter phenomenon, check out Geico’s Golden Gecko contest.

Opines Adweek of consumer-generated advertising: “Involving consumers in the creative process goes against the grain of the agency mindset as brand stewards, but the payoff can be more authentic messages.”

Although consumer-generated everything is being hyped like crazy these days, I don’t think this is just a fad. The prevalence of low-cost production tools, combined with the public’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for media attention, makes this likely to be much more than a cultural blip.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair is attempting to extract himself from another PR crisis — the manhandling of an 82-year-old Labour Party member at a party conference. Read the details here and watch the video here.