Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

CUNY Prof. Geanne Rosenberg has put up an online course for bloggers and media practitioners with the 10 things you need to know to stay out of court. As Jeff Jarvis, my source on this post, says it's quick, clear, easy, and fun with videos and quizzes.

The 10 rules to blog by:

1. Check your facts.
2. Avoid virtual vendettas.
3. Obey the law.
4. Weigh promises.
5. Reveal secrets selectively.
6. Consider what you copy.
7. Learn recording limits.
8. Don't abuse anonymity.
9. Shun conflicts of interest.
10. Seek legal advice.

Jeff also mentions Berkman Center at Harvard, who helped produced this course, is putting online a legal guide with information on such topics as setting up a publishing business.

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Jeff Jarvis says the corporate Blog Council misses the whole point, it's not the blog, it's the conversation that's key.

When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted to blogging, and the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It's not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you'll probably write crappy blog posts. I've said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven't written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I've seen and I think, 'I have to tell my friends about that.' You're the friends. So yes, I said, it's just a conversation. And reading — hearing what others are saying — is every bit as important as writing. It was as if scales were lifted from her eyes and weight from her back: She's just talking with people.

Mom always said 'God gave you two ears and one mouth and he did it for a reason. We are supposed to listen twice as much as we speak.'

With Jeff, 'It's not about them writing blog posts. It as much about them reading everybody else's blog posts.'

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"It seems to be a great time to be starting out in journalism. Just don't ask advice from anyone who has been in the business for more than five years." That's the advice of Saul Hansell, publisher of the New York Times Bits Blog.

Saul nails the historical party line for Journalism grads:

Find a gig where you can write — a small town paper, freelancing for an alternative weekly, a business trade publication (my route). If you're good, the story went, you would find you way to bigger publications and forge a career.

Seems foolhardy these days with newspaper revenues on the decline and newsroom layoffs. But from Jeff Jarvis's Entrepreneurial Journalism class at the City University of New York's new Journalism School, there's hope for the journalist entrepreneur.

Jarvis got the McCormick Tribune Foundation to put up $50,000 as seed capital for contestants in his class. Saul was a juror for the contest. Hearing a lot of interesting proposals, he concluded grads can 'now count on technology services to accelerate many parts of starting a business.'

Items of note from the contest:

• Hyper-local site for Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.
• Global magazine for Muslim women.
• Google's Ad Sense was on nearly everyone's plan as a source of advertising revenue.
• Specialized ad networks were relevant to some ideas.
• Starting an entire online service entirely within Facebook, ie, personal finance service for young people or a service meant to match high school athletes with college recruiters.

Everyone recognizes that another job is going to be needed to pay the rent for those going the entrepreneurial journalism route. Perhaps that's why we're not seeing as many ideas emanate from law grads. Two degrees cost a lot of jack, requiring a good salary to repay student loans, let along pay the rent.

But niche legal sites developing into quasi reviews, law journals, and treatises driven by technology services to accelerate things are coming.

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'Imagine a live social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.' That's the concept of Beat Blogging, an initiative launched by NYU Professor Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net.

Per J.D. Lasica, my source for this post, 13 news organizations want to see if it works. They include the Houston Chronicle, the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, ESPN.com, MTV, the Seattle Times. Some of the beats per JD: Child welfare, Dallas public schools, "green" tech, Big Pharma, digital music, Procter & Gamble.

Jeff Jarvis talking about the project, makes a lot of sense:

I like to think of this as turning reporting inside-out: Before, the reporter put himself at the center, because it was through him that reporting flowed to the press and public. Now there can be a network of people who report and advise and the reporter should be asking himself what he can do to help them do that better; the reporter stands not at the center but at the edge, which reporters must learn is where the action really is......I return to the wisdom of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg when he advised media moguls at Davos not to think that they could create communities but to instead realize that these communities already exist and so they should be asking what they can contribute to help them do what they already do better. Mark's prescription: give them elegant organization.

Beat blogging has great merit for not only reporters employed by legal publishers such as Incisive Media's ALM, but also beat news-reporters at newspapers and television stations. Who better to both provide information but to direct what is likely to be followed by the publisher's audience?

Greta Van Susteren at FOX News' On The Record is already doing this. Greta, a lawyer, regularly updates her blog, GretaWire, in which she solicits feedback and ideas on crime stories from viewers. Not unusual to see 3 to 5 posts a day with tons of comments.

As Jeff says, we're just tapping into a community that already exists. Our job then as publishers is to give the community elegant organization.

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Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post on how Glam, primarily a network of women's blogs a year and half old, has overtaken decade old iVillage, which has always been the largest women's site in the U.S.

Jeff explains how:

Glam finds the good blogs and creates a relationship. It features good content from them on Glam and also sells ads on the blogs, sharing revenue with and supporting those bloggers. It now has about 400 publishers creating about 600 sites...some mak[ing] multiple six figures a year......

So Glam is a content network. But they don't create all the content. They curate it. So we should curate more as we create less. That's another way to say what I've said other ways: Do what we do best and link to the rest .

Glam supports its network by selling advertising across the entire blog network. By providing such a platform Glam encourages others to produce more.

Jeff also discusses another blog network I've been following, ScienceBlogs. ScienceBlogs is self described as a community of 40 selected science bloggers, set up as an experiment in scientific communication.

The science bloggers do not have independent blogs in the sense of their own design, name and url ala lawyers on the LexBlog network. Their blogs are on the ScienceBlogs designed template and platform. But again it's ads being sold across the network of blogs that generate significant revenue for scientist bloggers.

LexBlog is launching a daily review of law blogs and journals called LexMonitor. So a network of high quality lawyer blogs is something I give a lot of though to.

Good law content on carefully defined niches in the law is being produced faster than people can consume it. Even sophisticated users of RSS feeds and newsreaders are challenged, let alone the vast majority of the public that remains at a loss when told they can subscribe to blogs, searches, and tags. Aggregating such content into an environment with editorial controls and community rewards may allow the masses to make meaningful use of such legal content.

In addition, taking on the large legal publishers such as LexisNexis and Thomson West as well as law review publishers requires a strong business model. Legal blog publishers certainly enhance their reputations as authorities through blogging. But it may not be enough to encourage them to produce more. Plus, with an independent source of revenue, legal scholarship could be produced by non practicing lawyers and law professors. Tasteful advertising across a network of legal blogs that passed editorial muster may strengthen the business model.

Interesting that Glam was driven by the question, WWGD? (what would Google do?) Google earns about 30% of its revenues from O&O sites (owned and operated by Google) per Samir Arora, CEO of Glam. The majority of Google's revenue is derived from advertising on non Google O&O's. Glam earns about 30 percent of its revenues through its O&Os.

Legal publishers like LexisNexis appear to distrust Google and its business model of indexing content, making it freely available and surround it with advertising. As Steve Matthews and others know I've been opposed to advertising on lawyer blogs, but perhaps there's an opportunity for new media legal publishers. Not to get rich off others' legal content, but to support an open and vibrant community of legal blog publishers.

I welcome your thoughts.

Note: Michael Arrington argues that Jarvis' post is misplaced Glam exuberance. I'm not arguing Web 2.0 silly valuations for a legal blog network, just that it's an interesting concept worth following.

Update: Jeff Jarvis' Glam redux at the UK's Guardian, 'To grow into the future media need a group hug.'

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