By Steve Stratford, News Editor
THE world is going blog mad, everyone's part of the great online Blog Party (see what I did there?).
So we at the Weekly News thought it was high time we had a blog of our own - after all, everyone else has one, whether they're Texan farmhands or controversial police chiefs.
Every week we will update our blog with the story behind the stories, the reality of what it's like to get a busy local weekly newspaper onto newsagents' shelves.
We'll share our trials and tribulations, our joys and successes, but most of all we'll give online readers extra insight into the makings of the current week's paper edition.
The blog will be written by different people within the editorial department - one week it might be your local reporter, another it could be the hassled news editor, another the design sub-editor who put the stories and pictures on the pages and wrote that oh-so-clever headline.
It will also give us the opportunity to explain why we do certain things a certain way sometimes. Pressures of resources, editorial space, staff, money, human error - the Weekly News is susceptible to all these pitfalls, just like every other organisation, and while we try our best to overcome them, sometimes we fail.
And when we do fail, hell hath no fury like a readership annoyed!
So hopefully you will get to know how a newspaper is put together as well as get to know those who do it.
And of course, producing a newspaper now includes producing online versions of what you see in the newsagents. The digital age is well upon us, and readers want their news instantly.
North Walian ex-pats living outside the Weekly News's circulation area are always telling us they are keen to read what's going on back in their home town. Welsh people in London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Paris, Bangkok and Vancouver are still interested in what's going on in Dolwyddelan, Llysfaen, Llandudno Junction and Dwygyfylchi.
And with the launch of the Weekly News online, that will now be possible. The loyal readership of our paper edition, which has been serving its community since 1889, can now be extended to the world wide web. Nowhere else, whether online or hot off the press, can you get the quality of detailed local reporting that the Weekly News provides every week.
So stay tuned, bookmark our site, because without us, you're missing something.
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