Header graphic for print
Real Lawyers Have Blogs On the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, & baseball

New York Times editor off base when it comes to lawyer blogs

Per the Editors Weblog, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, believes that new media such as blogs could never compete with the trustworthy news generated by actual newspaper reporting.

Keller says that things like blogs, search engines and Google News could never replace actual reporting. He says “What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of newsgathering – the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation.”…..He explains that sources like Google and Wikipedia cannot replace traditional newspapers because they do not produce content. They aggregate material from many different sources, some of which are very unreliable.

Lawyer blogs, in many cases do produce content. Lawyers ferret out information, supply context and explanation. Even if there were legal news reporters on the niches covered by law blogs, and there are not, reporters would have no where near the domain expertise of a skilled lawyer.

Blogs are not going to replace newspapers by any stretch of the imagination. But newspapers would be well served to realize well done niche blogs in areas such as the law are a trustworthy, if not the only, source of information and commentary.

Smart newspapers, the New York Times included, are leveraging the news platform they have to curate blog content to complement content the paper generates. We’re already seeing that in legal reporting. Incisive Media’s ALM is developing a law blog network. The ABA Journal is culling blog content as part of its online edition.

Give us a five years and 75,000 more law blogs and we practicing lawyers, law professors, and law students will be doing a lot of reporting. And a force to reckoned with if we are not incorporated into legal newspapers and magazines.

  • http://fluentsimplicity.wordpress.com/ Jonathan Kash

    Trust is key in this space, Kevin. I just started my MBA this week — the instructor had a word of warning “Don’t trust bloggers.” I find blogs — those written by adults with business and/or professional content — to be full of analysis and trends.
    Articles? There was a piece on MITs Technology Review on diabetic nanotechnology. “When someone’s sugar is low, the (nano) device could inject insulin”. It doesn’t take an M.D. to know that such an action could kill someone. Now why would I trust that?
    And I don’t think the NYT should comment on trustworthy reporting.

  • http://kevin.lexblog.com Kevin

    Trust is key Jonathan, but with it being so easy to vet the source via a few clicks on the net readers have the ability to decide who is trustworthy. I’d rather decide on my own who is trustworthy than have an editor and reporter who have domain expertise on the subject do it for me.
    Think about who have been the sources for newsrooms for the last couple decades. More often than not they’re ‘experts’ with good PR people feeing the news departments press releases and press kits.
    Law firms are notorious for doing this. Hire a PR professional with a good rolodex of contacts in journalism and get their ‘stories’ out there or at least get the firm’s lawyers quoted in relevant stories. And that’s our news?
    I’ll take a half hour on Google clicking around to determine if I’ve found a trustworthy source on a topic to subscribe to over waiting for a legal newspaper that is probably never going to cover the story and if it does may do so with less than reliable sources.