From Gawker:

Earlier this month, American Lawyer Media laid off 42 staffers across the board. The company is also "scaling back" plans to expand the scope of one magazine, and moving another to an all-digital format, according to an internal memo. One insider says all of the laid off people are gone, but a sense of nervousness still pervades the office.

And from Folio:

Ever since British acquisition firm Incisive Media purchased U.S.-based ALM last July for $630, it seemed that the Apax Partners subsidiary was on the fast track, quickly evolving from an entrepreneurial startup to b-to-b powerhouse.

Now, it seems there is some apprehension from inside-mostly about revenues. Is the legal market not as recession-proof as once thought?

Earlier this month, ALM slashed 47 jobs across the board. The company apparently is scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine and is shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print to online only.

Both Gawker and Folio reference CEO Bill Pollak's internal memo:

Folks,

Several weeks ago, I wrote to you about our business results for the first quarter of 2008 and shared some of the challenges we face as a result of the credit squeeze and other market factors. I also described our intention to tighten our belts and reduce costs. With no change in sight on the economic horizon, the senior management team and I have spent the past few weeks examining our business options. Our goal was to find solutions that would lower expenses without compromising quality, and which would allow us to continue to invest in and meet our long term business goals. In particular, we all strongly agree on the need to continue investing in our Web infrastructure, while expanding ALM's ability to generate and publish content online.

We looked at each business with these questions in mind: Are we getting the right return on our investment? Do we need to keep doing this work? Can we do this work another way? We believe that while we are primarily doing the right work in the right way, there are changes we need to make immediately to respond to economic conditions.

Some of these changes involve revising the timing or scope of planned initiatives. Others, however, are staff related and go beyond simply delaying the filling of open jobs. In total, we have decided to eliminate forty-two current positions across ALM and Incisive's US operations. These staff reductions are distributed across businesses, locations and job levels and all the employees involved have already been notified.

The business changes we will be making are also broad in scope. These include scaling back plans to grow Real Estate Media's Florida publication into a monthly magazine; closing down the Operations Department of Incisive's Norwalk, CT. office; and shifting Law Firm, Inc. from a print magazine to a digital product.

Another change in business strategy - and the one that will have the greatest impact on staff - is our decision to restructure ALM's Event Division and reassign management responsibility for many of our existing SRI conferences to Insight in Canada, Incisive's Events group in London and ALM's Legal Publishing Division. A number of SRI's financial events will be eliminated.

Accepting and working through change is never easy, and changes that affect our colleagues and friends can be particularly painful. We did not make these decisions lightly. But we know that our future success depends on our ability to align ourselves with our markets and clients, and to ensure we have the resources we need to develop and grow our brands. The changes announced today will not only help us during the current economic turbulence, but will make us stronger in the future.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note at
[Redacted].

Bill

ALM has some talented and passionate reporters, editors, and management folks - one of whom is Pollak. But as with the journalism industry in general placing greater weight on online media, there are going to be changes.

Added to that is Incisive Media's footprint. Incisive is a fast growing digital information provider doing some innovative things. With innovation will come change.

Expect ALM to be a force in legal publishing at the end of the day. But with digital gaining on print, things will just be much different.

Bill, who has been with the company since it's formation and currently serves as their CEO, brings a unique understanding of legal publishing to the table. In our e-mail exchange, he offers his perspectives on the current state of legal publishing, the ALM's use of technology at their website, and how he thinks ALM will fare in a world where traditional publications are continuing to fall by the wayside. See the full text in it's usual location (after the jump).

1. Rob La Gatta: When you started with ALM (at a time the Internet was still quite young), did you ever imagine the web would have had as profound an impact on your business as it has thus far?

William Pollak: All of my 1998 assumptions about the web have turned out to be wrong. Of course we all knew that we were witnessing the start of a new medium, and that certain parts of our predominantly print franchises would be jeopardized by the web. But the idea of user-generated content in all its many forms, and the revolution that that would bring to the dissemination of information, was far from being on my radar 10 years ago.

The idea that we newspaper and magazine publishers would originate our content electronically before or instead of putting it into our print publications was also not foreseen by most of us. And the idea that this new medium would not only eat into our historical revenue base but also open up dramatic new opportunities—things like webinars and new kinds of directories and blog networks—well, we didn’t see those coming 10 years ago either.

That being said, I should say that I’m also amazed at how little the web has impacted other parts of our business. For instance, powerful print brands remain powerful even in the electronic world, and have not really been supplanted by web upstarts. And law firms, by and large, continue to market themselves in much the same way as they have always marketed themselves.

Individual lawyers may have launched blogs and other initiatives to market their own expertise, but few firms have figured out how to use the web to extend their brands, generate leads and build their businesses. And, to give a third example, information may be more available for free via Google and the web than ever before, but West and Lexis remain healthy and vibrant businesses, just as they were 10 years ago. So we need to be careful not to overstate the impact of this admittedly powerful medium.

2. Rob La Gatta: Can you provide some insight on when ALM decided to begin incorporating RSS feeds onto Law.com, and what prompted this addition? Any information about the number of subscribers?

William Pollak: We began to incorporate RSS feeds around 5 years ago, as we learned the value of pushing our content out to other websites and RSS readers. Although we have no good measure of the number of RSS subscribers, or the traffic they generate back to our sites, our sense is that they have become an important source of traffic for us.

3. Rob La Gatta: What must a blogger do to get their blog included in your Blog Network?

William Pollak: Blogs are selected for our Blog Network in much the same way that outside columnists are chosen for our newspapers.

We look, first and foremost, at the quality of what’s being posted, the frequency and seriousness with which the blogger seems to take their blog, and our judgment of the value being potentially provided to our readers. Given our current list of blogs, we look for new offerings which will fill niches and add to our overall coverage. Right now we are particularly focused on finding blogs which cover the international business and practice of law, for example. And, of course, we look at the traffic which a new blog would likely bring to our network and to our advertisers—generally speaking, more traffic is better than less.

4. Rob La Gatta: What do you think is in store for ALM's print publications, in a time so when many newspapers and magazines are fading away? Is ALM is equipped to weather the storm?

William Pollak: Our newspapers are thriving and, I suspect, will continue to do well in the years to come. We are in the process of reinventing what a legal newspaper should be, and increasingly recognize that they are less about “news” and have become much more important for the court and legal information which they provide. We continue to gather and publish, both in print and online, a wide array of decisions, decision summaries, verdicts, court rules, calendars and the like. And many readers tell us that print is still their preferred means of receiving that information even while more and more of it becomes available from us online.

Magazines are somewhat more challenged, since most lack the element of “must have” information that one finds in a legal newspaper. I believe our magazines need to do much more to build their brands online, and turn themselves from monthly providers of feature stories and surveys into daily providers of community news and information. That will not be an easy transition, but I think we are strong enough to see it through.

As you may know, ALM was acquired last summer by Incisive Media in London. Through that acquisition, we have gained access to dramatically improved web technology and a team of experienced business-to-business publishers who are well-ahead of us in their transition to online publishing. As we now upgrade to new content management tools and other capabilities, I think you will see that ALM has the resources needed to succeed in the electronic age.

5. Rob La Gatta: In your eyes, what has been the most valuable impact the Internet has had upon the legal profession so far, and why?

William Pollak: The biggest impact of the web in the publishing industry has been to level the field separating journalists from readers.

In the pre-web era the paradigm was simple—editors figured out what was important, presented it to the reader, and the reader took it in. Now, there is much more back-and-forth, and much more user participation in the process of news gathering and analysis. Journalists may still be subject-matter experts on various topics, and their voice may be one which readers still want to hear. But the journalist now has to listen and react to users in a more direct way, and can no longer assume that their word will be the last heard on a given topic.

That’s an important and, I think, welcome change. It expands dramatically the amount of content available to include in—or link to—a given story. And I think it has the potential to build a much tighter bond between publishers and readers.

Interested in hearing more? Recent LexBlog Q & A posts:

• Mario Sundar, community evangelist and blog editor for LinkedIn [4.24.08]
• Kevin Livingston & Dennis Pfaff, the editorial team behind Thelen's Climate Law Update [4.17.08]
• Anita Campbell, editor-in-chief of Small Business Trends [4.15.08]
• Steve Matthews of Stem Legal, discussing the state of the Canadian legal blogosphere [4.11.08]
• John Sirman, manager of TexasBar.com and technology editor for the Texas Bar Journal [4.10.08]

Or, see our full list of legal blog interviews.

Doing a search for Martindale-Hubbell this morning, the first four results displayed are from legal blogs not affiliated with ALM in anyway. It was not until the fourth result did I find an ALM published piece.

What's the significance?

• ALM, a traditional legal publisher (National Law Journal and 34 other national and regional legal periodicals), is recognizing the importance of legal content published by bloggers.
• ALM recognizing that legal blogs, other than those selected by ALM's Law.com Blog Network, are of equal or greater importance than those in this network which the unknowing have labeled the best legal blogs.
• Legal research of a legal index that did not include legal blogs would be incomplete.
• Lawyers may self-publish via a blog without submitting articles to legal publications. Their content will be seen along side content published by legal periodicals.
• ALM, and its owner Incisive Media, recognizing that user generated content may be as important as their own content in the well being of their publications.
• Law.com could become a legal information center with more content produced by practicing lawyers, law professors, and law students than ALM's own reporters and editors.

Still some important features missing, such as the ability to subscribe to search results by RSS, but this is a good start for blogs at ALM.

American Lawyer Media, through it's own blogs, not the featured law blogs on Law.com, have begun to establish an Internet presence. It's not the blogs alone, but listening to Internet discussion on other blogs and joining the discussion via comments on blog posts, emails to blog publishers, and emails from ALM bloggers to ALM senior management about issues raised on the blogosphere. This is all being done in a transparent fashion that will make people more trusting of ALM, build relationships and serve the company well in the long haul.

Here's specific examples. I blogged about not having widespread WiFi for attendees at ALM's LegalTech Conference a few weeks ago. Monica Bay, an editor with ALM and publisher of The Common Scold blog, commented on my blog that ALM would look into the issue for next year. She also emailed me, copying ALM senior management, that they were working on it and pointing out some places at LegalTech where WiFi could be picked up.

I also recently blogged about another issue of concern to the legal community. This morning there was an email, copying me, from Monica Bay to senior ALM management about the issue.

Marketing these days is a discussion. A company needs to communicate with their customers and their customer's influencers. This communication needs to be done in an open and transparent fashion. The danger of failing to participate is real.

In addition, when a company is the subject of criticism on the net, they better have an effective way to respond. Press releases or, even worse, marketing communications coming weeks or months or later, are way to late to stem the tide of Internet discussion about a company's deficiency.

LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell senior management have posted a comments on my blog a few times and there have been the exchange of emails about my blog posts. Thomson FindLaw has never posted a comment on my blog, that I recall, but I have exchanged emails and had discussions with their communications' person. Rather than jumping into an open Internet discussion and engaging the Internet legal community at large on an issue I posted, the companies were only responding to me.

I urged LexisNexis and Thomson FindLaw to begin corporate blogs almost a year ago. Despite hundreds, if not thousands of corporate blogs having been launched and the legal industry being among the most active blogosphere, the two companies have said no go.

That's disappointing when LexisNexis and Thomson FindLaw are likely earning in excess of a Billion Dollars from law firms. Ought to be equally concerning when I here from law firms that these companies products are often lacking.

ALM still has a ways to go. Take some of that internal email and get it onto your blogs so the legal community as a whole can engage in real time discussion. This discussion is only going to improve your products & services as well as your relations with bloggers, who have the ear of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of your customers.

But at least ALM is entering the discussion. Been waiting 11 months for a LexisNexis or Thomson FindLaw blog. How many more months will it be?