Thanks for visiting the Paul Linford blog. This blog is now on hold for the time being for reasons I explain below.
1. The blog was originally spawned in a somewhat transitional period of my career between stepping down as political editor of The Journal, Newcastle, in August 2004 and becoming editor of HoldtheFrontPage in June 2008. During this period I was learning a lot about the internet but doing very little actual journalism, and I found the blog a useful outlet for my creative energies. Nowadays, all of these quite rightly go into my day job.
2. As I always suspected would happen, political blogging has fragmented into a small number of mega-blogs which have effectively become part of the mainstream media, and a much larger number of small blogs which receive very little traffic, interaction or attention from the political establishment. This is often no reflection on their quality, but it does have a fairly dispiriting effect as other political bloggers besides me have found.
The blog will remain online as an archive and - who knows? - may yet be resurrected in the future. But for now, it's goodbye.
Paul