Mormon Church gets a blog

The rest of us are living in the 21st century, but the Mormon Church seems to have just discovered blogging as an effective medium for communication:

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.

E-mails are welcome, but readers generally will not be able to post comments on the site. “From time to time,” Kirkland said in a statement, “we may open comments on some posts.”

The blog can be followed via Facebook, Twitter, e-mail subscription or rss feed.

Big news, I know. Reminds me of when the Israeli consulate joined MySpace.

To be fair, this here blog wasn’t created until 2007 and major institutions, whether we’re talking about the Mormon Church or Coca-Cola (welcome to Twitter!), tend to greet technological changes rather slowly.