Prepare for the first wave of Media Week bloggers

by Steve Barrett, Media Week 31-Jul-07

Please excuse my indulgence, but this week I am going to talk about a subject very close to my heart - Media Week.

As with all media owners, a trade magazine can no longer just exist in its traditional form - in our case paper and ink - although we know you still love the hard-copy version of Media Week and it remains the core from which all our activities stem. The Media Week brand now extends across a range of channels, including our Media 360 annual conference, Media Week TV, the Media Week Awards, our live Question Time events, special supplements and of course www.mediaweek.co.uk.

All these extensions to the Media Week brand are opportunities for us to interact with you, our readers, and for you to engage with each other. Through these interactions we aim to inform, entertain and create a community that provides you with information and tools to do your jobs better.

Now Media Week is entering the blogging age, which represents an ideal opportunity to further stimulate debate and share ideas amongst the Media Week community.

For starters, we have signed up three external bloggers to give their views on different aspects of the media landscape (find them by going to www.brandrepublic.com and clicking on the Blogs area of the Community section of the site).

Our launch bloggers are Mel Carson, Microsoft adCenter community manager for Europe; Matt Deegan, formerly a strategy executive at GCap Media and now a radio and social networking consultant; and Justin Hunt, a shareholder in Shiny Media, the UK's largest commercial blogging company.

In time, and if this channel proves popular, we will add more bloggers and community elements to Media Week 's online offering, which is all housed within Haymarket's Brand Republic media portal.

Do check out our launch bloggers as they blaze a trail for Media Week and reflect the hot media topics of the day. I'm on holiday for the next two weeks, but on my return I will be unleashing the Barrett Blog on the world as well.

I'd love to know what you think of our blogging initiative. And if you have any suggestions for people you would like to see blogging, or you think you have something to say that will interest our community, then please let me know.

Steve Barrett is editor of Media Week

steve.barrett@haymarket.com.