Pressing matters - when papers get blogging

Two of our local newspapers, the Chester Chronicle and the Chester Evening Leader, are now offering blogging facilities on their websites to readers.

Of the five on the Chronicle's site, one looked potentially interesting as it seemed to be about the Literature Festival but it has only one entry from last November and appears to have been abandoned. Of the others, two were by out-of-town readers (Runcorn and New Zealand), one is by a pair of Chester-based screenwriters - the Drama Queens - and is quite entertaining, and the fifth is the personal blog of Chronicle columnist John Buckley.

Over at the Evening Leader, there were more blogs to choose from. However, as the paper is based in Wrexham on the other side of the Welsh border, unsurprisingly most of the blogs were not about Chester. Martin Wright, the paper's deputy editor, has a fairly eclectic personal blog on the go, while colleague Steve Graves, focuses more on the business of journalism.

Regents and princes

Chester being such an ancient city, it's steeped in rich pickings for those interested in local history. Modern-day Deva has quite a few local writers publishing books on various aspects of Chester's past. But so far, I've only found one blog. Sue Wilkes is a Chester-based writer who has already published one book and is now working on her second, which will be about Regency Cheshire. This should be interesting reading and will fit well with the various tomes already on the shelves covering Chester's industrial past and more ancient times.

Sue's blog is still in its infancy but her posts on literature in between updates on her career as a published author are well worth a look.

An amusing diversion is Nelson's Column, an intermittent but very funny blog by a pedigree cat living in Chester in constrained circumstances with a moggy he doesn't get on with.