The New York Times has announced that U2 lead singer Bono is now writing a column for The New York Times and NYTimes.com. A release said:

“Beginning this Sunday, his columns will appear occasionally on The New York Times Op-Ed page and online at nytimes.com/opinion and will cover a broad range of subjects.  He will also do a podcast of his first column.”

Bono’s first column here. It starts ‘in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s’. Not everyone is a fan – the Pheonix’s Adam Reilly is not too impressed by the ‘Frank Sinatra homage’:

“Lame topic, overly florid writing, a journalistic conflict of interest….” Reilly writes.

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U2 frontman Bono and development economist Jeffrey Sachs are teaming up with FT.com in a bid to form the world’s ultimate rock group to blog their way through the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals summit, which starts in New York on Thursday.

Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Bono will post ‘development diaries’ throughout the event, a release from the paper explains.

Coverage was kicked off with a Q&A with Bono, who, it seems, is taking his duties pretty seriously:

AB [Andrew Beattie, FT trade editor]:What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?

Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.

Or then again…

AB: What exactly happens in the meetings you have with these world leaders?

Bono: Judo in a suit.

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