Jay Small's blog

Early this year Ka and I incorporated Small Initiatives. She was engaged in long-term consulting to modernize an insurance agency, and I had accepted a couple of new clients for Web development work. We wanted the structure and protection of a corporation, and felt we would need it for the long haul.

Since then, we both finished our MBAs, her gig ran its course, and I became deeply involved in comprehensive restructuring in my day job that will occupy mindshare I might otherwise spend on clients. Meanwhile, the ceaseless paperwork and bookkeeping requirements of an S-corporation made the whole thing more stressful than useful.

As such, we happily dissolved Small Initiatives, Inc., effective a few days ago.

Headlines and snippets popped up in blogland yesterday that seemed to say just more than half of American newspaper publishers are gunning to implement paid content strategies on the Web.

For example:

• Alan Mutter: Only 51% of pubs think pay walls will fly
• Lost Remote: 51% of the newspaper publishers in the United States believe they can charge successfully for access to their interactive content (in defense of Cory Bergman, he's quoting from Mutter's post.)

Links with longer shelf life and less cholesterol than fried butter, as if that's hard:

• Bakersfield paper may shutter community sites: Or may not, depending on which local executive you believe, and which lines you read between, in this PaidContent report.

First, Tim Rutten makes the case that saving "premium" journalism means an act of Congress -- specifically, an antitrust exemption so papers can collude on paid content pricing on their Web sites. Then, the reaction.

Steve Outing, for example:

I love this line of reasoning from Jeffrey Phillips. He remarks how his four-times-a-year golf game belies very low expectations of performance, then this:

"The comparison I want to make to my very part-time golf game is to the part-time efforts most firms put into innovation. If you want to be good at golf, you'll get instruction, play frequently and learn the nuances. Similarly, if you want to be good at innovation, you'll get instruction, work with a pro, learn the tools and use them repeatedly and constantly. Innovating occasionally is like golfing periodically. You may get in a few good shots, but you won't be consistently successful."

I often say a key goal of any Web site redesign should be to make the next redesign easier. Given the rapid pace of redesign launches among newspaper.com sites in recent weeks, it appears some last-generation design work was aimed toward that goal.