Twitter Dither

The Herald is plunging headlong into the digital age with its Twitter and its Facebook presence and its Web sites and its blogs.

In my travels, reader reaction is all over the map. Our core readers (about my age and set in their ways) tell me they don't cotton to all this Internet junk and they don't think we ought to waste a lot of our time with it. They prefer the feel of a real newspaper, especially now that The Herald ink doesn't come off on their hands.

But times have changed and The Herald can't afford complacency. It's no secret that newspaper circulation continues to take a hit. In readership, if not on the financial ledger, newspapers make up for that reduction with unique hits to their Web sites. As many people are reading The Herald now than when I first started working here, but about a quarter of them are doing it online.

So that's why I'm learning to Tweet.