Dean Lavine launched a blog on myMedill this week. It’s supposed to be “a place for discussion and interaction with the Medill community about where the school is going.”
Except that it has no comments. Or RSS. Or a way to e-mail a post to a friend. Or any conceivable way of sharing a post. And, like the rest of myMedill, it’s only accessible to Medill people. Which makes it less of a blog and more a column in a newspaper so small that it doesn’t even have any comics on the back.
What just puzzles me completely is that instead of posting answers to our questions, on, you know, the blog, you have to download and open a Word attachment instead.
I like it when Medill tries to become more open. I don’t like it when we hear an argument for “delivering relevant, differentiated storytelling and messages that engage the audience” and we get considerably less.
MSJ blogger Rob Mentzer also points out, somewhat more kindly, the lack of comments. Medill software engineer Bret Walker left a comment there:
Just as a “what-were-they-thinking” note, one of the blogs Dean Lavine mentioned when he asked for me to create a blog for him was Romenesko, which solicits direct feedback, but does not have a traditional commenting system. That’s the model used here.
Romenesko doesn’t have comments for each post, but he does have an open comments page where anyone can leave public feedback. He also posts several times per hour on weekdays with news and feedback from readers.
And, hey, this blog may not be the smartest in the world. But at least you can leave a comment about how dumb you may think it is.