Hello world!

Here we go then. The Birmingham Post’s new website goes live in 19 days’ time, and seeing as the process was informed from the start by responses to my colleague Joanna Geary’s wordpress blog, I thought it only right that I should come here to give people an insight into the final countdown.

I’ve put Jo in charge of recruiting bloggers for the new site, and therefore couldn’t complain when she pointed out that the editor should lead from the front and post a blog himself. I’ve resisted the temptation in the past, I think, as some other newspaper editors’ blogs seem to consist of Meldrewesque griping and self-serving ‘look-aren’t-I-normal-like-you’ condecension. Not great additions to the sum of human knowledge, in other words.

So what do I want to achieve with my contribution to the world’s blog surplus? Perhaps I could put down some immediate objectives for what I want this blog to be / do:

• An honest account of the process of engineering a new website for a business-led broadsheet newspaper in the West Midlands region of the UK
• Somewhere to record what I learn from this about the development of online journalism
• A place to discuss the issues that inform news gathering and editing decisions at The Post
• An opportunity for others to contribute to all of the above

I’ll add / subtract from these objectives as I go. In the meantime, I’ll welcome more suggestions from anyone with ideas about what they’d like to see on this blog.

Marc Reeves

Editor, The Birmingham Post