Since January the Birmingham Post and Mail group have been running a couple of blogs, one for the Post and one for the Mail. To be honest I kinda missed them until now though in my defense the page on icBirmingham isn't particularly enticing.

So, are they any good? The Birmingham Post one is not bad at all. A manageable roster of seven bloggers means you get regular postings across a wide range of subjects and the posts themselves tend to be fairly high quality and in depth. It's still early days but I can see this developing into a neat little group blog for Birmingham that isn't too dependent on the parent newspaper. One to watch.

The Birmingham Mail one, on the other hand, is pretty dire. It appears to reproduce the opinion columns from the paper and so has that really annoying one-sentence-per-paragraph preaching tabloid style where there's no room for debate or discussion. (At least I hope it's just reprinting - I'd hate to think someone would blog in that style willingly.) It's almost interesting how it grates with the rest of the internet, but not interesting enough to justify the blogs existence. One to avoid.

They both use Movable Type which is nice to see but for some reason they've stuck with the default template which, frankly, is awful. I appreciate this is probably a trial and they don't have the budget for a designer but some better colours would be nice. Good that they have full RSS feeds though.