JaySmall.com/old

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 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.

Don't let Steve Yelvington's excellent rebuttal (started to say "analysis," but it's more direct than that) to the American Press Institute "Newspaper Economic Action Plan" pass without due consideration.

After wrapping up his 10-part series on what local newspapers should do to survive (he rolled up all the recommendations in one post), John Temple posted a wise reply to questions I asked him by e-mail last week.

My questions, in a nutshell: What about photojournalism? Can it be considered a strategic asset for local newspapers?

John wrote me back, but then expanded on his reply in the blog post. Good advice abounds these days on his blog, as the post exemplifies:

Charles Apple, one of the primo bloggers at Visual Editors, picked up the discussion about the future of design at newspapers and the troubled Society for News Design, in particular. In Apple's post, he channels Dean Lockwood of the San Antonio Express-News: