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.

Jon Bounds at Birmingham: It's Not Shit seems to like it.

Paul Groves at Groves Media gives it "a tentative thumbs up for now".

Nick Booth at Podnosh says Birmingham should be proud!

Paul Bradshaw has an interesting post on his blog, calling for ideas about the ways newsrooms could change in order to help journalists adapt to changes in the industry.

My initial response was heartily to endorse his first idea, which is to make it easy for journalists to know when someone has commented on something they have written, so that they can respond.

People sometimes comment on blog posts you have written weeks ago, and unless there's some kind of alert system to tell you, it's easy to miss them.

In more general terms, I'd like to see news organisations develop content management systems which are designed to get journalists doing the things they (presumably) want them to do.

Let me see what's happened to something after I've written it - not only whether there have been any comments, but whether anyone has even read it.

And when inputting stories, provide a way for me to provide links to go with it, if appropriate. As I said before, encouraging hacks to set up delicious accounts is all very well, but it won't happen.

I also have my doubts about how many of our readers actually use services like delicious. You end up with a situation where newspapers embrace these services because we think readers want us to, and then try to educate our readers on how to use them.

Links can be very useful with a story, but they should simply be placed on our websites next to the story itself, as the BBC does already.

The debate I referred to earlier on Jo Geary's blog has taken in a lot of issues, but one of them I think boils down to the idea that journalists need to take the reins themselves, as the businesses they work for are incapable of providing leadership (and I'm not suggesting that's Jo's view, just one of the views that seems to have emerged from the many comments and blog posts from various people).

I don't agree with that. We are seeing leadership from Trinity Mirror and, in any case, I believe that's where it has to come from.

My advice to any newspaper business hoping to get journalists to embrace new media is this:

1. Make it easy for them.
2. Tell them to do it. It will happen.

The Birmingham Post's big relaunch takes place on Monday, when the first edition of the new compact paper comes out. There's also a spanking new website to go with it, although I'm not certain whether that is launched on the same day.

What isn't quite in place yet is the new editorial structure to go alongside the more visible changes. Rather than having three newsdesks, with three sets of reporters, there will be one, to cover the Birmingham Post, Birmingham Mail and Sunday Mercury.

So instead of a Post reporter writing a Post story, you have a BPM Media reporter - the business' new name - writing a story which could end up in any of the papers. They send it to newsdesk, and the news editors decide where to put it.

The aim is to make better use of economies of scale, so that staff are able to get more done by avoiding duplication. To put it another way, each paper now has more staff than it used to - albeit shared with the rest of the business - and should be able to do a better job of reporting the news.

I'd been under the impression that Birmingham was the first Trinity Mirror operation to go down this road, but I'm told by a friend on the Western Mail that they've already done something similar in Wales.

In any case, this is the way of the future for the company - not something we've been told, just my prediction - so colleagues in Liverpool and Newcastle might want to pay attention!