Every blog needs a reason to be. Mine is to help me find my feet.
Between 2005 and 2007 I ran Southside Media, a not-for-profit social enterprise publishing community newspapers and online social networks in the southside of Glasgow. I returned to BBC Scotland in October 2007, two years after I'd left, in the hope that I'd left behind a self-sustaining enterprise - a model of local journalism and community networking that could shine long into the future; a model I hoped others might be able to replicate across the country.

We'd been going for two years. We were just about breaking even every month. We'd started with very little financial support, but were punching well above our weight. We published great wee papers - well-designed, well-liked, packed with news and holding all kinds of local bodies to account. Our online networks were well-used and were helping people share information, ideas and opinions.
But it wasn't to be. The first winds of the downturn blew away our advertising revenue like Dorothy's Kansas cabin. We stopped publication in July 2008.
Without the papers to act as a focus, activity on the community sites began to drop off considerably and I decided - in a fit of pique probably - to have them taken down. It was too hard for me to have them ticking over when the enterprise that was behind them had folded.
So. I'm now at the BBC where we're about to have a national strike over compulsory redundancies [Update - the strike's off after an eleventh hour agreement.] The newspaper industry in the UK is going through the worst period of lay-offs and cutbacks that I've ever seen in my time as a journalist. And people are trying to look at new models for journalism in the future.
So I'm going to use this blog to think about what journalism is, what it should be and how it can function in this new open world.
All comments gratefully received.
April 2010: I write poetry, so I thought I'd put some of that up here too.