By Craig Mortimer, Website Manager

The January transfer window is without question one of the most interesting times of year in the football calendar.

Some of the speculation this month has really been quite comical, and it just goes to show why many football clubs choose to never comment on speculation. If we reacted to every transfer link during January, there'd just be no room for anything else on the website!

Many times our press office will get calls about players that are just simply never going to join this club. Steve Coppell has said himself that press regularly ask him about players he has never even heard of.

I think it's important for clubs' official sites to retain credibility. If it's on here, you know it's true. Sometimes our site will take a little more time to get a story out because we wait until it's 100%, and that's the way an official site should go about its business.

One prime example of how crazy things can get in the January window are the stories about Kevin Doyle last week. Kevin did our weekly press conference before the Villa game, and was discussing Steve Sidwell's move to Chelsea, and how Siddy hadn't played as much as he probably would have liked.

It was put to Kevin that maybe a move to a 'big four' club is not always a great idea for a player, but he simply replied that if one of those teams come calling, you've got to take the chance to further your career. Anybody would do what Siddy did. Kevin said that if he never wanted to take a chance during his own career, he'd have stayed at Cork City and not come over to Reading.

On the back of those quotes, some headlines suggested he was inviting offers from other clubs, which was crazy. I think it's disappointing when a player can't talk honestly for fear of it becoming a headline.

We've recently begun to publish most of our press conferences as a full transcript on this site, which I think gives a better insight into the person answering the questions, and the reader can see how a conversation really developed. The Doyle transcript is here, and it's pretty obvious he was just talking openly about an interesting subject. Sadly, it didn't come out that way in many of the subsequent reports.

We all love to read transfer speculation, talk about it, discuss who we'd like to sign and find out as much about new signings as we can. I think there's room on the internet for all the different sites that enable us to do that. That's partly why we don't have a forum on here, and why we don't have a gossip column.

A gossip colum would be great if we were only interested in cranking up the hit counter. But this site is the gateway to Reading FC, and we want fans to know that if something is going to happen, it will be reported here.