I am a lobby correspondent working from the House of Commons.
What I Do
I write local and national political stories. I also write a regular column for the Birmingham Post, a weekly diary for the Birmingham Mail and leaders for the Post. I also blog on the Post website.
This is my personal website where I intend to write, occasionally, about political journalism. It may not be updated as often as it should be, as I also have a blog on The Birmingham Post site.
Media organisations could encourage journalists to embrace new ways of working by making it easy for them.
For example, articles can frequently benefit from the inclusion of related links. One method of getting those links to readers would be to create a del.icio.us account and direct readers to it.
But a simpler method would be simply to input them with the story itself. This would also allow the business to make better use of them, as the links would be associated both with an individual journalist and with a specific story, as well as being stored on the organisation's own servers. (Links from a journalist's del.icio.us account can be accessed as an RSS feed but I think it would be technically difficult to associate the right links with the right stories this way).
One of the obstacles to journalists doing this is frequently the content management system they use, which may not be designed to accomplish what the media organisation is trying to do.
Media businesses should take the initiative and develop systems designed to make it easy for staff to achieve what they want them to achieve.
I also believe that, while it makes sense to use whatever applications and web services are out there for the taking, it would be a mistake to rely on them. We should deciding what we want to do and then doing it - inspired by what other people are doing, rather than depending on them.
Below is a dummy front end (for authors) of a content management system which I think would be easy to use and accomplish some of what a multimedia news organisation should be trying to accomplish.
Okay, it's a bit of a naughty headline. But they have increased the number of press officers employed by the civil service.
Sir Gus O'Donnell, cabinet secretary and head of the Home Civil Service, today defended an increase in the number of press officers in government and said the increase was a response to the 1,600 political bloggers in the UK.
I've never understood why businesses got so excited about Second Life (pictured, left). If you've never played it, it's a 3D graphical application - kind of like a game, except without the actual game - which allows you to create a character and fly around a virtual world full of things other people have created.
These creations can be buildings, vehicles, clothes other characters are wearing, or just about anything you can imagine.
It's like World of Warcraft without the elves. What it does have is lots and lots of porn, as people use the freedom it offers to make pornography and sell it for real cash.
There was a period, which hasn't quite gone away, of organisations creating Second Life material to promote themselves, such as an "office" in the Second Life virtual world.
It's also used for virtual conferences. Microsoft and the Social Market Foundation think-tank roped West Bromwich MP and Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson into taking part in a fringe event set in the Second Life world during Labour's conference in September.
Online gaming guru Raph Koster is developing something better.
His Metaplace project will allow people to develop their own virtual world and stick it on their website (by embedding some flash on the page).
It is better than Second Life because:
There is no need for visitors to download a client. You just need flash on your machine, and 99 per cent of us already have that, even if we don't know it.
People can access your world directly from any website you choose.
There's no need to share your virtual showroom or conference hall with a thousand badly-textured penises. Worlds are self-contained, but you can link to others if you wish.
The only downside I can see is the cartoony default graphics, but you can create your own graphics if you wish.
Here is a video about the internet and porn (don't play it at work):
Adobe Flash Player not installed or older than 9.0.115!
Culture Secretary Andy Burnham gave regional journalists the strong impression he doesn't plan to intervene in the row over the BBC's planned local news websites.
Trinity Mirror CEO (and therefore my ultimate boss) Sly Bailey told an industry conference earlier this month that commercial news organisations were investing in digital platforms.
But she said: "If online audiences are diverted away to BBC sites though unfair competition, using public money and the BBC's unparalleled promotional machine, there will be an impact on the commercial sector's ability to develop these digital businesses, to grow these digital revenues and to invest."
The BBC's strategy "is anti-competitive, it is unnecessary, and it will waste public money," she said.
Mr Burnham talked about the importance of local newspapers and his admiration for the work they were doing developing digital media.
But he said it was not his role to tell the BBC what to do, and pointed out that the BBC Trust (chaired by former Birmingham Council Chief Executive Sir Michael Lyons) was already considering these issues.
He also said the BBC deserved some credit for developing its website ten years ago, when it got some stick for doing so.
I've added a new page to this blog with a round up of posts from Birmingham and West Midlands-based bloggers, with the highly original name Blogroll (on the menu up top).
As I write, three of the posts listed focus on the new-look Birmingham Post.
I've never understood why businesses got so excited about Second Life (pictured, left). If you've never played it, it's a 3D graphical application - kind of like a game, except without the actual game - which allows you to create a character and fly around a virtual world full of things other people have created.