Straight Talking enters the Blogosphere

Here's the plan. From this week onwards Straight Talking will live a dual existence.
It will appear in print as usual but it will also appear as a blog on the web at the address niallgormley.blogspot.com.
For those of you who don't know a 'blog' is short for a Web Log, a sort of an online diary that allows people to express their views as they wish. But it also allows readers to make comments and observations and thus earns the status of 'interactive' media.
Some say that this method of publication is the future and some of the old media owners are indeed rattled by it. The reason for this is that it operates 24 hours a day and can respond in real time unlike daily or weekly papers. Some people, indeed, see this type of interactive media as the death knell for newsprint.
Well, maybe. Down the line.
What we are going to do is to try and combine the two. My column, for example, has never been about reportage. I don't break news and I couldn't even if I wanted to.
The column has always been about ideas and ideas don't have deadlines. Ideas get worked through by debate and reaction. In some cases the same ideas resurface again with new slants and takes.
The blog will allow this to happen. And when it does, we intend to publish the emerging ideas back into the paper where those ideas can be exposed to the audience of the old media.
Online views many be more plentiful but only in a handful of cases is the readership more than a few hundred. We have three newspapers here at the Dublin Media Group with a combined distribution of 158,000 copies a week. My column appears in all three (except when we run out of space), so the readership potential is pretty big.
There's an opportunity here that doesn't exist with other online blogs and discussion boards. What I intend to do is to run a short recap of my column each week accompanied by the best contributions from the blog, edited by myself for space. And we'll see how it goes.
I do have an online presence at the moment at niallgormley.com. I haven't been good at keeping it up to date and the last column I put up on it is from November 2005. This demonstrates a flaw that all websites have - the tendency to go out of date.
The way around this, and the way for all users of the web to overcome this, is to actually do the work online. The reason my website is out of date is because I do my writing for the newspaper and I upload it later. Then the uploading never gets done!
In future I will be writing the column online and it will be worked on there in order to make it fit for publication both online and in print. When this happens I will truly have made the transition to the cyberworld. My first column online is 22 October 1999 and I think I must have been pretty much the first Irish journalist to have my own website. It's taken seven years to get to the next step. I've been dawdling on the superhighway.
Talk to you over at the blog. (niallgormley.blogspot.com)