The Inside Track with Stephen Dempster
THE News Letter has always prided itself on providing the broadest and most in-depth of political coverage.
And while there has been a dumbing down in some areas of the media, over the years, the newspaper has consistently given more space than most to breaking political stories and informing local and national debate.
It’s a cliché but it’s fair to say that, in particular, if it’s happening in unionism, it’s happening in the pages of the News Letter.
Though in recent years the scope of our coverage across the political divide has widened and now includes more comment from republicanism and nationalism – as a direct reflection of the changing times.
Perhaps then it is time to put the hands up and say “fair cop” to the charge that while concentrating on maintaining standards and story output in print, we have been a little slow off the mark in getting around to creating a political blog.
Goodness knows we have talked about it often than I would care to remember.
But more often than not, that same day, another Stormont hot-potato story would break, a row would erupt between parties, deadlines loomed and the blog idea was put on the backburner for another day.
This time, however, the Editor set a cunning trap.
Choosing the relatively quieter time of August (he may have done that last year too, mind you, and still the blog never materialised), he said “I want you to get a political blog up and running on the website” – almost as if we had never had the conversation a hundred times before, which was polite of him.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I will talk to to the News Editor and IT about setting it up.” Fully meaning what I said, at the time, before one of those hot-potatoes landed on my desk and I forgot all about it…
Well, at least until I got a call from the News Ed.
“We’ve set-up the blog on the website and are ready to go live,” she informed me, “so we just need you to start writing.”
I thought about replying, “I’m a bit busy, I’ll get round to it, there aren’t enough hours in the day you know”.
But I sensed we’d reached the end of the line on talking about a blog and I’d been cornered.
So, here we go…
The idea of this blog is to provide regular postings, offering insights, updates and maybe just pure title-tattle from behind-the-scenes at Stormont and the local political scene in general.
Often snippets that for one reason or another do not make it to print.
Sometimes it will be serious, other times it may be throwaway.
But hopefully, it will always – or at least often – be informative and add something in the way of context, background or asides, to compliment the extensive political reporting already offered in the newspaper and on the website, everyday.
