TVW comments

TVW has a blog (hat tip their twitter), but not with comments:

On the point of accessibility, one thing you won’t find here is comments. Why? If we do our job right, you’ll be a more informed citizen after reading The Capitol Record. That might make you want to share your opinion with someone. But the office of your elected official is the more appropriate place to do that. We’ll help facilitate that direct communication by providing links to the Legislature’s web site, where you can find the contact information for your elected official.

I have a problem with this because it assumes that engagement is best between a citizen and an elected official. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think the more valuable engagement is between citizens, and TVW is giving up on that.

Yes, its much much easier not have to moderate comments from readers, but they're shutting off communication between their readers.

Another interesting thing about the TVW blog is it makes TVW a defacto media organization, more along the lines of what a real, post newspaper, media organization would look like. Original musings here.