I think that this blogging thing is going to stick around.
I say this because of short news report from veteran scribe Peggy Fletcher Stack of the Salt Lake Tribune about another blog -- from a somewhat unexpected source -- that has entered the digital blogosphere (including Facebook and Twitter). Here's the news:
The LDS Church's Public Affairs Department has joined the lively, often contentious world of Mormon blogging.
The blog -- at http://newsroom.lds.org/blog/ -- will include "commentary, additional context, localized stories and background to help the news media and the public better understand news and issues related to the church," Lyman Kirkland, the department's manager of social media, wrote on the site.
The information, managed and written by the church's public-affairs staff, will be "reliable and accurate," Kirkland wrote, but "should not necessarily be viewed as official statements from the [LDS] Church." In addition, the blog's tone will "more conversational" than the usual LDS news release, he wrote.
As a rule, the site will not be open to comments from the public -- for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has ever tried to monitor the comments pages on a post about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Can you imagine the number of copy-desk pros (or Brigham Young University journalism-department interns) it would take to edit the troll-esque comments on such a site? However, Stack noted that comments may be allowed from "time to time." Stay tuned.
Anyway, anyone want to predict who makes a guest appearance as the flash point in the very first post on this new all-things-Mormon weblog? You got it -- the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway, because of her recent "Kiss kiss bang bang" post about Associated Press coverage of those post-Proposition 8 "kiss ins" that drew dozens of people from coast to coast.
I am sure that you are shocked -- make that "shocked, shocked" -- that MZ's name popped into the LDS news mix so fast.
However, this little online item has reminded me of something that your GetReligionistas have needed to do for some time now. We have long needed a "Mormon" file in our "categories" system. And if we are going to create this file, we need to know what we need to dig out of 5-plus years worth of material to put in it, to get things started.
Thus, in the comments pages for this post, please let us know which essential GetReligion posts need to go into this new niche. Tell us the ones you liked or, if you must, tell us the ones that you hated (and why). However, please know that there will be no way to avoid the word "exaltation." Go ahead, ask Mitt Romney.
OK, fire away and keep it clean.