Plugged In

"They asked me to join them, put all my content on the site and help them build the site," she says. "They're not in the business of supporting a local music scene; they're in the business of launching a hyper-local media site, but they needed a product to show off the bells and whistles so they could attract investors."

In exchange, Chaffin would benefit from a huge, free overhaul--new design, more bandwidth, more resources for audio and video recording and a team of interns to assist with the site's concert calendar. "Maybe it's the first chance to make some money too," she admits. Texas Gigs merged with Pegasus News, and Chaffin's labor expanded almost immediately.

Orren and the rest of the Pegasus staff lined up some fantastic promotions--in particular, their Mavericks Playoff Theme Song Competition has attached their name to the team's most successful run in franchise history--and the listings section became a local music Wikipedia of sorts, full of profiles for every venue, concert and band in town. Last month, the site received awards from the Dallas Observer and Editor & Publisher and celebrated getting more than 200,000 hits in a month--quite a load of traffic for a site whose scope is incredibly narrow.

Texas Gigs had never been bigger. Chaffin was recording and posting hours of multimedia content unmatched by any site in town. But on May 26, she went silent. Her daily updates were frozen, and the rest of the Pegasus crew didn't explain why. Almost two weeks later, she announced her departure from Texas Gigs. She had sold the domain name to Pegasus News and was starting a brand new site called the Fine Line (finelinelive.com) with local booking agent Amanda Newman.

"Just in the last 24 hours, I've gotten to be OK with it," Chaffin tells me only days before publicly announcing the deal. "I've taken Texas Gigs as far as I could. It's in a place where I don't have to sit around and do concert listings all day; there's a place for that now. We want to focus on quality and lots of audio/video content. Branch out a little bit into art and photography, cover a cultural scene."

Orren wasn't surprised by the move. "We'd always known that as we got closer to launching Pegasus and Texas Gigs became a sub-site, we'd re-evaluate the relationship," he writes in an e-mail. "At the six-month mark, Cindy decided that was the time to have that conversation. And she felt like she wanted to go back to playing in her own space, with her own identity."

In the weeks since, it's hard to figure out who's the winner in the split. Though Texas Gigs still has a huge, unmatched listings section (which Orren says counts for 70 percent of traffic), its news reports and blog posts are missing Chaffin's commentary and charm. Meanwhile, the Fine Line may have restored Chaffin's "identity," but the lack of Pegasus News' polish is showing in the new site's earliest days. Two weeks ago, Orren said he'd link frequently to the Fine Line, but in a recent Texas Gigs report about the closing of Deep Ellum venue the Texas Tea House, Chaffin wasn't given credit for breaking the story days earlier on her own site.

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As tense as that split may seem, it's downright tepid compared with the flame wars that frequently erupt among music blogs, and it ain't got nothin' on We Shot J.R.'s almost daily blasts of flame from J.R. and his fans alike. Even a few of those have come from Scott Chaffin.

In February, J.R. condemned Dallas music fans who would rather blindly "support the scene" than face up to how bad many local bands are; in that post, Cindy Chaffin and Texas Gigs took a few licks for her open-arms stance: "It's a waste of time to go to a site that you know is going to promote any and everything that is happening on any given day." Scott hopped on to "support" his wife by calling the anonymous author a "puss" and telling him to "put on your dunce hat and sit in the corner." (Cindy is level-headed about the exchanges: "I don't care about that stuff. It's fun, and I have respect for what [J.R.] is doing. When Scott jumps in, I don't even know he's done it. I have no control over the man.")

It's hard to deny the car-wreck appeal of seeing anonymous fever sweep the site's comment boards, as fans have been inspired by J.R. to don virtual masks and spew ridiculous levels of ire in all directions (ours included). But flame wars are a dime a dozen on the Internet, and J.R. doesn't have a following simply because he's pissed or pissy. For one, his "it list," a daily--and highly consistent--series of concert and DJ recommendations, has made the site the best source for last-minute local underground concert announcements.