Jay Small's blog

Last week it was business travel. This week posting will be light because I am working the annual online conference we at Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group put on for the local and corporate leaders of our newspaper division.

Next week I have no excuse, so just in case you care, I'll try to make things more interesting around here after the company confab.

I hopped on a quick business trip to California yesterday, so expect slow posting here. I encountered a pleasant surprise en route -- and the fact that it was such a surprise just tells you how low travel in these United States has gone:

Continental Airlines still serves modest hot sandwiches, free, on flights long enough to warrant them -- including my connection yesterday from Houston to Los Angeles.

I rarely fly Continental -- Knoxville tends to be more a Delta spoke, if anything -- and judging by the surprised looks on others' faces when the sandwiches came out, other infrequent fliers were just as amazed.

The Philadelphia Inquirer will hold back much of its content from the Web until it has appeared in print, says Mike Leary, managing editor, in a memo to staff picked up by Romenesko.

Jeff Jarvis, already on a roll on the subject of curmudgeons, declares Leary's decree "suicide." To Steve Outing, it is simply a "discouraging" step backward.

At the moment, both Bloglines and LinkedIn are down -- the former showing a generic "back-soon" splash, the latter claiming an upgrade is under way.

(Unless it's one whoa-nelly upgrade, I can't imagine prime time is the best time for a scheduled service window.)

Anyhoo, I see no blog buzz on these outages. What's the scoop?

Five minutes later: LinkedIn is back, but if it's upgraded, the new stuff has all the subtlety of a recluse spider.

No one told me this was Top 5 List Week. I spotted another useful list in Webland, this time, the five hidden costs of content management systems over at Vitamin.

In a nutshell:

1. The cost of training
2. The cost of quality
3. The cost of functionality
4. The cost of redundancy and flexibility
5. The cost of commitment

In my experience, over the years training costs on modern CMS have dropped, but costs of commitment -- which I will extend to include costs associated with keeping internal customers happy -- keep growing no matter how good, or new, the system.

Chris O'Brien provides five steps for newsroom innovation in a post at MediaShift Idea Lab. In short:

1. Make it [innovation] a priority.
2. Create a process.
3. Foster new collaboration.
4. Offer incentives.
5. Evaluate and learn.

All great advice, and the details support it well. I jump off, however, whenever people say no one in media exerts this effort, as O'Brien warns:

"Newsrooms should, but won't, offer financial incentives. They should, but won't, offer bonuses or revenue sharing for ideas that prosper."