Notice in the Gilling New Service: 9 September, 2014

Keywords: Miscellaneous;

Brian Easton will be doing a weekly column on the website Pundit:

http://pundit.co.nz/.

Usually it will be put up Monday; sometimes Tuesday. His first was this week at http://pundit.co.nz/content/how-good-is-our-schooling-really-0.

Brian says, ³the initial reaction when the Listener column was ended was to say that after I have done enough and retire. However I was greatly moved by the large number of people who contacted me and regretted the termination; warmingly that included professional colleagues as well as general readers. So I must have been getting something right. Moreover, I think I still have things to say – indeed while writing the column I had a work list for about three months out and it has got longer while I have been Œoff the air¹. .

³I¹ve got such a backlog that I am initially going to do the columns weekly.

We¹ll see if we can keep it up. The first columns will be from the backlog (including columns that were rejected by the Listener editor), although they will be interspersed with contemporary columns. It¹s a new media format for me so I am betting things will change; let me know how I am doing.

Just by way of background, Pundit is a broad ranging serious blog. One of the things which attracted me to it was it has some exceptional contributors but also that it is not confined to a single political view point with its panel ranging from retired Green politicians  to retired National ones and many others beside. (The editor is Tim Watkins, a professional journalist whose current job is executive editor for TV3¹s The Nation.) So I hope that, if you don¹t go to it already, my joining them will encourage you to be a regular reader. (I am acutely aware that the digital disruption – now there is a column in my to-do list – means that the funding of the blog is precarious; by being a regular visitor to it, you strengthen its base.)