Don't miss Steve Dyson's new blog

Former Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson's new blog "Dyson at Large" launches on HoldtheFrontPage today.

Each Wednesday, Steve will be looking at a different regional title and giving his assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and today he kicks off the series with a look at the Nottingham Evening Post.

We're really pleased to have someone of Steve's experience and high profile in the industry blogging for HTFP and we're confident it will give people even more reasons to visit the site.

Bookmark this URL to see all of Steve's blog posts on the site.

Speculation mounts over Birmingham dailies

Speculation is mounting in the blogosphere over the future of the Trinity Mirror owned titles in Birmingham.

Nearly two months ago, the company launched a wide-ranging consultation over the future of the Birmingham Post and Mail.

Options under consideration included turning the Post into a weekly title and printing the Mail overnight. It is believed this would save around £1m a year on van runs.

Trinity Mirror is saying nothing officially as yet, but two Birmingham-based blogs are claiming that an announcement on the proposed moves is imminent.

Philip Parkin, operations director of the Birmingham Press Club, writes on his blog that "the coming week promises to be a significant one for The Birmingham Post."

"My spies tell me that this is the week that the announcement about the newspaper’s future is due to be made, with the switch to weekly happening sometime in late November," he says.

Another Birmingham blogger calling himself The Stirrer goes further, saying the announcement will be made today.

"Expect fireworks from newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror in the next 24 hours, with confirmation that the Birmingham Post is going weekly – possibly as early as November 5," he wrote yesterday, claiming staff have already been told that "major changes" on both titles are imminent.

3.30pm UPDATE: It's now official. The Birmingham Post is to go weekly, the Mail is to go to overnight printing, and both their editors have decided to leave. All the details over at HoldtheFrontPage.

Web-first or print-first?

Welcome to The Journalism Hub...and what better subject to kick-off with than the good old print vs online debate.

It is fair to say opinion within the industry on the question of whether newspapers should "give away" their content online for free rather than "force" people to buy the print edition to find out what's happening locally has moved pretty much full circle over the past decade.

I recall being at a gathering a few years back at which one regional newspaper editor declared that stories would be uploaded to the web "over [his] dead body." It got the biggest cheer of the day.

Nowadays, though, websites are seen effectively as editions of the paper, with most breaking news going straight online - although it remains the case that no-one has yet found a surefire way of making money from it.

The debate was highlighted this week in a blog post by Birmingham Mail editor Steve Dyson on his his decision to go print-first with an exclusive letter from footballer Gareth Barry explaining his reasons for leaving Aston Villa for Manchester City.

Steve revealed that his decision to delay uploading the letter to the paper's website for half a day had generated an extra 4,000 in sales and, confident that this would provoke the kind of debate we love to see on the site, we made it our top story on HoldtheFrontPage today.

For me, one of the great things about HTFP is the fact that it is, increasingly, the forum for discussion about issues facing the industry, and our readers did not disappoint with some fairly trenchant views expressed.

One poster calling themselves 'Edna' wrote: "You mean to say that giving something away for nothing stops people from paying for it...? Astonishing. If only journalists had been saying this for years, I'm sure editors and MDs would have listened."

Steve Dyson, though, had the last laugh on this occasion. As he revealed in a follow-up post on his blog today, he not only got a 4,000 + sales lift from the move, he also got an extra 30,000 web hits - the best of both worlds!

For me, the lesson from that is surely that print vs online is a false opposition. The truth is both have a vital part to play in the future of our industry.