  Diffractive meson production at HERA offers interesting possibilities to
investigate diffractive processes and thus to learn something about the
properties of the pomeron. The most succesful phenomenological description of
the pomeron so far assumes it to couple like a $C = +1$ isoscalar photon to
single quarks. This coupling leads, however, to problems for exclusive
diffractive reactions. We propose a new phenomenological pomeron vertex, which
leads to very good fits to the known data, but avoids the problems of the old
vertex.
