Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

The LA Times online has grown its revenues to the point where they cover the cost of paper's entire editorial payroll. And Neilsen Net Ratings reports the LA Times has passed USA Today and the Washington Post in uniques with, according to internal numbers, 138 million page views in November, up more than 70% in a year, and 24 million uniques, up 125%.

Russ Stanton, editor of the LA Times, in an email to Jeff Jarvis: 'Given where we were five years ago,” he email, “I don’t think anyone thought that would ever happen. But that day is here.' I'll add to Jarvis' Amen to that.

Key to the success, in addition to a crack online editorial team? Blogs.

When I became innovation editor in January 2007, only four of our 49 blogs were produced by our staff, and those blogs accounted for only 2% of our site’s total monthly traffic. Today, we have more than 40 blogs, all but six of which are produced by our staff, led by Top of the Ticket, our presidential campaign/politics effort started by Andrew Malcolm and Don Frederick. Technorati now ranks Ticket in the top 60 blogs on the internet. At last count, about half our newsgathering staff — more than 300 professionals — are contributing to our blogs. In several of our traditional print sections (California, Sports, Books, Health, Travel), the entire staff is participating in that section’s main blog. That, in turn, has been acknowledged and valued by our readers. Today, our blogs account for 16% of our total monthly page views.

The second part of the Times secret sauce is education of its staff.

With some help from our HR folks, we’ve set up a 40-class curriculum on how to expand the skills our staff needs in these key areas. The most popular classes so far are learning the software program for posting to the web, headline writing to improve SEO, how to shoot and edit video, and 360-degree storytelling, taught by Aaron Curtiss, our innovation editor.

As I shared last week, blogs are now mainstream. Both for the media and for companies selling services or products.

For law firms, blogs will be acknowledged and valued by your target audience of clients, prospective clients, and the media (other bloggers and main stream media). Rather than continue to kick out your lawyer's intellectual capital in white papers, articles, newsletters, and alerts, why not steal a page from the LA Times playbook for success.

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With our growing work on LexMonitor and teaching the art of blogging, citizen journalism, and social media to what's about 1,000 lawyer clients, LexBlog hires journalism and communication students, both as interns and as full time employees upon graduation.

Unfortunately, for new media companies like LexBlog and traditional main stream media companies, graduating journalism students are woefully unprepared for the real world. A world where online investigative reporting via blogging and the effective use of RSS, citizen journalism, and social media are as, if not more, important than print.

The irony is that newspapers and traditional media are laying off high paid senior people and would love to have students with a hungry work ethic skilled in the ways of new media. Instead of these kids getting journalism and media jobs where they're needed, they're underemployed serving tables and lattes while begging to get their foot in the door for an opportunity to learn the skills they need.

Believe me, I've got a stack of emails and resumes from kids like this. And I feel guilty that I should be paying them more than the value they're equipped to offer.

The people who should feel guilty are the deans and directors of journalism schools at Universities who took hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition moneys without telling students and their parents the school will be graduating your sons and daughters without the skills they need to get a job.

LexBlog hired Rob La Gatta, then a junior at Seattle University, as an intern 18 months ago. We were fortunate to get him to join the team as a full time employee this summer.

When I called the chair of Seattle University's Communication/Journalism department as a reference and told him about what Rob would be doing, he bragged that the school doesn't teach students about things like blogs which are just things used by people ranting on the Internet. When I referenced some of the things LexBlog offered students, he seemed to dismiss them as some sort of 'tech school skill.'

When I asked the same department chair about what student interns are paid, I was told I would never be able to compete with what newspapers like the Seattle Post Intelligencer paid the school's journalism interns. Turns out the Seattle PI paid Rob nothing when he interned there before LexBlog and we paid Rob $10 per hour with an increase when he went full time for a quarter.

And as far as I know, Rob was the only graduate of Seattle University's Communication/Journalism program who had a job on graduation this summer. A job directly related to the journalism and communication profession.

Mindy McAdams joined the faculty of the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida in August 1999 as the Knight Chair for journalism technologies and the democratic process. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in online journalism.

McAdams' perspective on teaching online journalism.

We online evangelists in journalism education are often accused of advocating a lot of technology training — ‘vocational skills,’ some would say. I recommend that a lot of journalism — both real-world examples and practical assignments — accompany the skills instruction. If the lessons come out to about 75 percent journalism and 25 percent technology, I would suggest that you can’t get that from the computer skills class at the community college.

McAdams, who also blogs at 'teaching online journalism,' shares a presentation at slideshare she gave yesterday at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Related resources are linked on this page, which she prepared for journalist training in Vietnam this summer.

My aim in this presentation (to visual communication educators) was to lay out a framework for introducing basic multimedia skills for journalists. There are four to six modules, depending how you choose to slice them up. The total instruction time could be as little as 15 hours. Certainly your students won’t be experts after only 15 hours, but they can begin producing the type of work that news organizations are looking for. Whether the students produce work of sufficient quality depends on what kind of assignments you require them to do — and how much effort they invest in the work, of course.

It's understandable that Universities employing professors, deans, and department chairs who did not cut their teeth in the world of online journalism, are lagging in this area. But it's inexcusable for such schools not to immediately explore ways to educate current students on the skills they need to succeed in today's world.

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Couldn't agree more with Pat Thornton on that one.

And I've got some skin in this game. Not only is my son, Colin, a junior in the Journalism School at the University of Montana, but LexBlog is going to be employing a fair amount of journalism grads and interns in the years ahead.

Rob LaGatta, a senior journalism student Seattle University has been interning with us for the last year. He may have earned himself a position on graduation by his desire to learn business.

Problem for Seattle U is that he didn't learn the first thing about business or entrepreneurialism while he in school. Rob and his fellow grads may have learned journalism skills but that ain't going to pay the rent as he tells me he isn't sure if anyone in his class has a journalism job upon graduation.

Pat makes some excellent points.

Journalism needs enterprising journalists to think of new ventures to modernize journalism. Opportunities in journalism will increasingly be from entrepreneurial routes as the mainstream media continues to wither away from obsolescence.......Traditional media companies are failing, journalists don't understand how to make compelling products and new media ventures are beginning to take over. That's where solid entrepreneurial skills come in.

The opportunities are out there, they're just different.

The opportunities for journalists are growing, not shrinking. The traditional, MSM routes are rapidly shrinking, but the avenues for business savvy, enterprising young journalists are ever expanding.

Journalism schools need to give students the skills needed to succeeded in modern journalism. That means a little business sense is now needed.

We've got another Seattle U j-school student joining LexBlog as an intern this week. I feel good not only about the contributions she'll make to our mission of empowering lawyers through publishing, but also about what she'll learn about the business of journalism today.

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Though employing more than ever, it's the latest sign of the newspaper industry's ongoing struggle to stem losses in advertising sales and circulation.

Two reports from the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The day may come when Americans trust bloggers more than the main stream media. May be the day's already here.

Less than 20% of Americans believe what they hear from news media. That's down 25% from 2003 according to a new Sacred Heart University poll.

Americans gave the national news media poor ratings in six different areas measured. The average positive ratings were:

• Quality of reporting � 40.7 percent
• Accuracy of reporting � 36.9 percent
• Keeping any personal bias out of stories � 33.3 percent
• Fairness � 31.3 percent
• Presenting an even balance of views � 30.4 percent
• Presenting negative and positive news equally � 27.5 percent

For folks who believe bloggers try to sway public opinion, the media is viewed as doing the same. 87.6 percent of Americans believe media try to sway public opinion, up from 79.3 percent in 2003.

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41 years ago Paul Steiger began his career in journalism with the WSJ and LA Times in 'an industry of family-owned newspapers... setting off on a momentous period of growing power and profit.' Next Thursday he leaves the WSJ, including 16 years at its managing editor, and an 'industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable.'

The Journal's editors asked him to retrace his experiences of the past four decades in search of insights into how all this happened, what may happen next and the implications of all this change for readers, the nation and society at large.

'Read All About It' is Steiger's story chronicling the days of Camelot, where investigative reporting had no bounds, including first class air travel, to today, where newspapers have been 'shredded by the Internet.' It's a lengthy and great read on how newspapers may have returned to their past where 'less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.'

Take aways for me are the contrasts of feast and famine Steiger draws:

The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.

At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.

Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap. Others have begun to argue for a government subsidy for newspapers -- an unlikely prospect for now.

And the struggles faced in the industry's transformation:

Many papers are seeking to leap ahead in adapting to the movement of readers and advertisers to the Internet. This means tightly holding down costs of print publications while leveraging metro papers' principal unique assets: local reporting staffs and local ad-sales teams.

Cash from newspapers' own Web offerings has grown fast but needs to grow faster, because at current rates it will be years before it makes up for the slumping inflow from the still-much-larger print side. As Google, Yahoo and similar Internet enterprises suck away ad dollars, many newspaper companies hope to gain new revenue by forming once-unthinkable partnerships with each other and some of these same rivals, particularly Yahoo.

Positive for us is where Steiger is headed. To a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief.

When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We'll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.

Pro Publica is funded by philanthropists providing $10 million a year in funding. As Steiger eludes to, it may be that philanthropy will be one business model protecting investigative reporting so important in a democratic society.

Empowering hundreds of bloggers with LexBlog, I can't help believing that lawyers blogging on niches using their examination skills will also play a role in investigative reporting. Such blog content may not only be read on the blogs themselves but be syndicated to the likes of the Wall Street Journal.

Tapping into such free editorially controlled syndicated content gives newspapers local and niche legal content, perhaps better than they ever had. Opportunities lie ahead.

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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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A legal beat reporter's blog may be more effective than a story in the next day's (week's in some cases) newspaper, per Wayne Ezell's story in this morning's Jacksonville Times-Union.

Among other reporters, Ezell referenced the work of reporter Gordon Jackson, who blogged from inside a Georgia courtroom about a high-profile murder case and highlighted the advantages of reporter's blogs.

First, the reporter provides more information and insight than can be found in news stories constrained by space and the restrictions of traditional straight-forward writing style.

Jackson wrote in greater depth about the trial of physician Noel Chua, for example, providing more details about each witness's testimony than would get into the print edition.

.....

Second, blogs foster interactions with readers, even from afar...

.....

Finally, blogging allows writers to be more informal and more venturesome in their reporting, even as they take care not to lapse into commentary and opinion.

I agree wholeheartedly with Times-Union Editor, Pat Yack, "Done right - timely and crisply - blogs do have a great value."

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