I've just completed a moderately hellish four-hour car journey from Birmingham where editors gathered today for our quarterly forum. It's a fine city but throttled by traffic at rush hour when not a lot of rushing happens.
Anyway, there was lots of talk about the digital age, an age with its own language that's as tough to learn as Welsh.
- Hey Rob, is that a new digital platform you got there?
- Why it sure is.
- What kinda platform is it Rob?
- It's a Content Agnostic Platform.
- Woohee!
Much debate over the issue of whether you should publish stories online as they break without holding stuff back for the print edition.
We heard about some papers in Australia who push everything online then develop the story in the next available print edition. The good news is that these papers are seeing lots of web traffic and very healthy print circulation figures.
It's food for thought. We are certainly breaking a lot more stories on dailypost.co.uk and beating the BBC website hands down. But am I ready to put everything online first?
I'm still agnostic on that one.
What do you think - will "online first" hurt the paper or give you an appetite for more detail in print? And keep your comments coming on the previous blog - what's the Welsh Assembly ever done for North Wales?
I've published a couple of replies - one of them very to the point indeed!
Lynne Evans wrote...
I definitely think you should post online ASAP. My husband buys the paper every day. I read online everyday. We have plenty of lively discussions about the day's news and no fights as to who gets the paper first.
Congratulations on a first class paper which is as informative as any of the Nationals but with the local news we need to know.
Posted by: Lynne Evans | February 6, 2008 3:15 PM