the elusiveness of the LDS Newsroom

You know what’s interesting is that the LDS Newroom is currently in beta format, which means some old articles don’t exist anymore. For example, Bruce Hafen’s speech to Evergreen last year is gone. There’s this page that says Hafen gave a speech, but then you can’t access the actual speech anymore. Maybe it’s just a temporary issue of the beta, but other old links actually redirect to new URLs, so I guess we’ll see.

The Oaks/Wickman interview from 2006 is still there…and the various articles about the level of support the Church offers the gay community, such as last November’s support of the SLC ordinances and the recent response to HRC. My guess is that under the auspices of a new site design (which uses automated search for articles that I’m guessing is not entirely automated), they’re cleaning up in other ways, too ugly URLs.

I really like their extended statement about the history of the PR department, the “elusiveness” of media today (aka the Internet) and the diversity of public Mormon personalities (celebrities and Mormon.org) and how this all relates to the “prophetic voice.” But if indeed the Newsroom is for “Church-watchers,” it’s kind of frustrating when it comes to the sourcing of articles that don’t exist anymore. You really have to add the notation “(accessed on this date),” because you never know when they’ll decide to correlate change the URLs.

With that said, I kinda like the new Newsroom.