Sun’s Kavanagh ‘blog’ debuts

By Lou Thomas

The Sun has become the first red-top to jump on the blogging bandwagon.

Political commentator and former political editor Trevor Kavanagh began a new online column on Monday with a piece on high taxation under the present Labour government.

Although Kavanagh’s column is labled “the blog politicians fear” and includes a link inviting reader email responses, some purists will not recognise it as a blog. The pages do not currently include links to other websites, permanant links for each entry, or the ability to comment directly to the site.

Kavanagh said: “I’m under the impression that I don’t have to do it every day or even every week but I get quite a lot of response. I feel that I need to out of a matter of courtesy, respond to that response. Which is interesting in itself because quite often it generates new aspects, new thoughts about stories or articles that we’ve carried in the paper.

Kavanagh said he had received far more e-mails on Monday than usual.

Asked if he thought other Sun writers would be writing blogs Kavanagh said: “I’m sure they will be if this works. To a large extent this is putting our toe in the water and seeing how it goes. if it works I wouldn’t be at all surprised if others follow suit because there may be an appetite for it.”