And so it came to pass that I found myself with another blogging outlet, this time for the Birmingham Post, our local broadsheet newspaper that coincidentally just relaunched it’s website as something a darn sight better than the icnetwork abortion they used to have. My first post there has the catchy title What exactly does Global City Local Heart mean? and will be of interest to no-one outside the Birmingham metropolitan area and remarkably few inside. Which is kinda interesting really.
In fact this whole Birmingham Post Blogs thing is a pretty interesting experiment as the closest thing it’s ripping off (and that’s not a criticism – everything online is a rip off of something else) is, from my perspective anyway, The Guardian’s Comment Is Free only with a local perspective. And while the target audience presumably remains the same – the business and political communities of the West Midlands – it’s got a potentially global reach. Potentially being the key word there, but still.
All said, though, this is early days and we’ll see how it develops over the next few months before passing any kind of judgment. I did want to put down some thoughts about why I’m contributing to it though.
If you’ve been paying attention and joining up the dots you’ll probably know that Joanna Geary is in charge of running the Post Blogs and that’s she’s a friend of mine, but that wasn’t the motivation for joining. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind or hers until I heard Jon Bounds was thinking about it. Hell, if that fucker’s in then I’ll be damned if I’m not, I thought to myself. Jokingly, of course.
And then I had a little think. I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of context online of late, brought into relief by the Max Gogarty debacle but also based on my various blogging outlets. I write in a subtle but markedly different voice on all of them based on a variety of assumptions – the perceived audience, the suitability of the subject matter, the level of irreverence I want to convey or simply the sort of blog I’m trying to sculpt. And most of these will be quite subconscious as I evolve into the skin of the beast, if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor there. If I was writing under the banner of a newspaper owned by Trinity Mirror how would my writing change? That’d be interesting, I thought.
But, it must be said, not interesting enough to do it for free. Oh yes, we who aren’t on the payroll aren’t getting paid for this. So if I was going to join this merry band of opinioneers I needed another compelling reason to do so. That came pretty quickly, all said. I have many missions, two of which can be summed up as “Promoting blogging and related forms of online communication” and “Changing how Birmingham as a city works for the betterment of man and womankind”. This venue lets me deal with both of them at once, helping to shape the development of a relatively high profile blogging community whilst getting my message to that newspaper’s perceived target audience. In other words, were I to write about our council leader Mike Whitby on this blog he won’t notice or care, but when I do so on the Post site an eye, be it his or a lowly assistant, will pass over it. It turns out that Created in Birmingham gave me a platform in this city. Not a particularly high one but a platform all the same. This gives me another one pointing in a different direction. And considering I’m not really required to write more than once a week if that it’s worth it.
The thing is, having written that first piece in ignorance of how the site would work I’m not completely happy with it. It reads, oddly enough, like my attempt at a newspaper column, not a blog. Looks like finding my voice there isn’t going to be as easy as I might have thought, which is no bad thing.
If you’re already subscribed to my Yahoo Pipe then you’ll be getting the Post blog posts through that. The rest of you can use this feed and I’ll no doubt link to them here too, just for the record.
Oh, and it wasn’t my idea to be a “Lifestyle” blogger. I’m not even sure what that means. Maybe I’m supposed to be blogging about furniture or something…