On today’s anniversary of 9/11, I couldn’t help but to think back on twenty years ago. I draw inspiration from the challenges and adversity we face as a country and the heroes who rise on those occasions to help others – I got it from my Mom.

On 9/11, eighteen years ago today, I was in a Boston hotel across the street from where the five terrorists who flew the American Airlines plane into the first World Trade Center stayed.

I was in Boston after selling Prairielaw.com, a virtual legal community, to LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. We were in Boston to do usability testing for lawyers.com, a consumer and small business law site which incorporated the community and content we created at Praielaw.com.

My heart was only half in Martindale. My baby and my dream of helping lawyers and the people they served was sold to a large corporation.

Today, thinking of 9/11, makes me wonder why average folks like me can’t rise to the occasion when it comes to the challenges we face as a country. What’s stopping us? We have the technology and the Internet that no one had before us.

One challenge close to my heart and the team working here at LexBlog is legal services being inaccessible to 85% of the people in this country.

The cost of a lawyer is not the deciding the factor for most people, lawyers have simply become irrelevant to people. The vast majority of lawyers aren’t out connecting with people in a real and authentic way. People don’t know lawyers and lawyers don’t know people.

I moved my family to Seattle twenty years ago this last Summer on a mission of creating a virtual legal community of people helping people. Think AOL on the law.

I’d seen as a practicing trial lawyer the power of AOL. Its message boards and chats enabled lawyers to connect with people. An intimate relationship of trust was established.

In just a year our two our small law office helped thousands of people via AOL and the open Internet. In turn, we built a nice reputation and relationships.

It was clear to this guy, who didn’t know a lick about technology, that the Internet could develop business for a lawyer while at the same time the lawyer was out helping people.

With the help of the venture capital community and a great team here in Seattle we got that virtual community up and going. But with its sale and the teams’ being jettisoned by the acquirer, the ability to connect lawyers with people, for good, was lost for a bit.

In due time tough came the realization that blogging enabled lawyers to connect with people. Connections established by listening and engaging in a real and authentic way. Connections founded on a lawyer’s care. Connections that established real trust in a lawyer. Connections that made legal services more accessible.

So came LexBlog, with its mission today of connecting lawyers with people, for good.

People whether a consumer, corporate executive, in-house counsel or small business person. Simply doesn’t matter. Blogging works to connect.

In pursuit of our mission, we’ll continue to do all we can to empower and inspire legal bloggers, worldwide. We’ll empower them them our platform and training. We’ll inspire them by shining a light on them, their blogging and who they are as caring professionals – and people.

We have a ways to go in incorporating existing legal bloggers into the LexBlog community and finding lawyers to cover the hundreds of areas – topic and geographic-wise – not covered by legal blogs today.

The challenge is trivial compared to challenges faced by families who lost loved ones on 9/11 and by the workers who developed life threatening diseases by working the 9/11 site to save others.

LexBlog is making it’s aggregated and curated database of legal blogs freely available to legal research providers (libraries, legal research companies/platforms, AI solutions) via an enhanced RSS feed.

Providers will have open and free access to almost a half a million legal blog posts and an ongoing feed of posts from 1,400 blogs and 23,000 blog authors – and growing by the day.

These blogs include both blogs published on the LexBlog platform as well as blogs published elsewhere. Inclusion is free on LexBlog.com, the source of the feed.

Legal blogs represent the leading source of legal insight and commentary on the law today.

Articles from lawyers, law professors, law students and business professionals in the legal field that used to find their way into law reviews, journals, periodicals, and even books, are now predominately published on WordPress, an open source publishing solution which grew out of blog publishing.

These articles annotated case law, codes and regulations, the things we classify as primary law. It was common practice for lawyers to cite at the trial and appellate level this secondary law as persuasive analysis of primary law – still is, except this secondary law is now generally published on blog software.

The problem (we see as an opportunity) in annotating primary law with secondary law comes from the democratization of the printing press. Legal blog posts come from everywhere, in all sorts of feeds.

As a solution, LexBlog will start offering an enhanced RSS feed of over 400,000 legal blog posts from 1400 sources and 23,000 authors. The authors and daily post count will grow as legal professionals submit their blogs for free inclusion in LexBlog.

The RSS feed allows a partner to pull into their database the following content from a post:

  • <title>
    • Title of the post
  • <link>
    • Link to the original post
  • <date>
    • Date post was published
  • <creator>
    • The author of the post
  • <category>
    • The category of the post
  • <content>
    • The content of the post
  • <source>
    • The Source term associated with the post
  • <organization>
    • The Membership term associated with the post

LexBlog vets blogs so as to limit the feed to credible sources, manages the onboarding of the feeds from the blogs so as to create a clean feed and add additional metadata and sets up/maintains the feed.

The Legal Blog Feed Project is another way in which LexBlog can empower and inspire legal bloggers, as well as contribute to the advancement of the law.

We look forward to seeing partners from legal research, legal libraries, AI and legal research platforms use our free and open feed. We also look forward to their feedback.

Our RSS Terms of Service is posted here.

I recently blogged about the concept of a legal blogging community, something that existed in the early days of blogging

Readers saw my post as a yearning for the old days of legal blogging when we followed each other’s blogs and got to know each other in a real and meaningful way.  Folks responded that getting back to that sort of community was not possible.

That’s okay, fifteen years in Internet time is the equivalent of about fifty years offline. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even the term, “social media” didn’t exist then. A lot of water has passed under the bridge.

But there’s no reason we cannot have a community that empowers and inspires legal bloggers, nationally and world-wide.

A place where legal bloggers and wannabe bloggers can find bloggers, their publications, and relevant legal/social commentary and insight. A place where bloggers can find bloggers and publications to follow and take their engagement beyond blogs to mediums they are already using – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. And a place that connects lawyers with people.

Here’s a crack at what LexBlog could do to make that community a reality.

  • Take blogging to a higher level. Little question that blogging is one of the best, if not the best way, for a lawyer to build their reputation and market themselves. The mission of a community would be focused on something greater than ourselves – to connect lawyers with people, for good. Lawyers are irrelevant to 85% of people. It’s not the cost of a lawyer, it’s trust and not having a clue what lawyers do. Lawyers, coast to coast, blogging on issues relevant to consumers, small business people, corporations and other organizations will get lawyers out where people are, on the net, and out in a real and authentic way.
  • Community includes all blogging members of our legal industry. Private practice lawyers, law professors, in-house counsel, lawyers in government,  business people, legal libraries/librarians, law students,  company leaders and entrepreneurs, financial community/venture capitalists funding legal businesses and others. Dialogue and insight across our industry is needed to advance the law, make it relevant to people and deliver effective legal services.
  • Education and support of bloggers. There is more misinformation about what blogging is and how to blog than there is good information today. A community run by LexBlog will provide education and support to bloggers through various mediums.
  • In addition to an online community facilitated by a publication, described below, and social media, a community will have offline events whether they be meetups by locale, subject or larger conferences.
  • For bloggers and wannabe bloggers lacking a strong and effective blogging platform, LexBlog will provide them with the legal industry’s leading blog publishing platform. For lawyers on a budget, LexBlog can make its platform available at prices the equivalent of WordPress.com. For law schools and non-profit’s the platform is free.
  • A powerful publication covering countless subjects in the law curating the best in legal blog publishing from lawyers in the States, and then overseas. Each piece being penned by people in the know – experienced and caring legal professionals. You are seeing the early stages of that publication at LexBlog.com being run by Melissa Lin, Bob Ambrogi and others on our publishing team.
  • Publication would be the visual equivalent of the New Yorker, the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic or The Athletic. Bloggers need to look at their publishing surrounded by the publishing of a who’s who of legal professionals, worldwide, in an eloquent and beautiful presentation. Enough so that they’re holding up their iPhone to their spouse, colleagues and who have you and saying “look at this, isn’t this incredible, look where I’m published and look at how great it looks.” And why not? As a small town lawyer for almost twenty years, if I could publish on my own publication and have it shown to the world in something like that, I’d be pretty pumped.
  • At all times this publication recognizes it’s all about the lawyers and legal business professionals and the people they serve. The publication is not indexing the blog posts nor is its goal to get traffic, its purpose is to shine a light on bloggers, their work and the good things they are doing.
  • Publication is run on outstanding technology, that’s constantly being updated at its core and with new features added regularly.
  • Dynamic directory of legal bloggers by which users can find bloggers by topic, state, metro, subject, law school, associations (bars etc), organizations and law firms.
  • Profiles of bloggers, displaying a New Yorker style byline, backgrounder, contact information and social media handles.
  • Profiles of blog publications and the organizations publishing such publications.
  • Extending the curated publishing to bar association, law school, law firm, CLE and organization magazines ala Illinois Lawyer Now shining a light on member bloggers and their publishing – and getting the bloggers’ insight to relevant readers. “Magazines” of curated blog posts will be created by geographic areas, areas of the law and industries and causes so that readers and other community members may easily subscribe by feeds or email to the latest relevant insight and commentary.
  • Recognition that much of legal blogging represents secondary law that should be annotating primary law and influencing the interpretation of the law by lawyers and the courts. Open API will be made available to legal research, AI and other legal tech companies to help make this happen.
  • Recognizing the better bloggers by locale, topics, firms, associations and organizations.
  • Recruitment of existing credible legal bloggers and blogs into the community.
  • Community leaders by topic, industry, association and locale recruiting bloggers, encouraging bloggers, citing best practices/bloggers/publications, teaching and running online and offline events. Community leaders were the lifeblood of legal communities at AOL and Prairielaw.com (later becoming the community and content at LexisNexis’ lawyers.com). Helping others and working on a cause greater than yourself, all the while building relationships and a wide reaching reputation is attractive.
  • Identifying gaps not being covered by blogs and recruit the needed bloggers. For example, states may have six or seven good sized cities (that’s relative by state) for which core areas of the law are not covered by legitimate blogs. Subjects such as family law, workers compensation, real estate, employment law, criminal law, estate planning, elder law, personal injury, immigration, disability and social security come to mind. There are plenty of niches within those areas of law as well. If we’re going to connect lawyers with people by lawyers personally communicating in a real and authentic fashion, the community needs to cover core areas of the law in key metro areas.  There are also any number of areas of law and industry not being covered by lawyers representing corporate and government clients.
  • Community is free and open to bloggers, users/readers and the beneficiaries of an API.

I’m sure there are twenty-five other things LexBlog could do to help create and foster a legal blogging community. My list represents my quick thoughts. I welcome your ideas and your feedback.

LexBlog was founded to help lawyers build relationships and a reputation by connecting with people in a real and meaningful way. A global legal blogging community feels right on point, while making a far greater impact.

The concept of a legal blogging community is inspiring to me. Always has been.

Back in the day, when law bloggers were bloggers, we got to know each other.  Virtual as it was, we had a bit of a community going. 

We followed each other’s blogs, often with a news aggregator, commented on other’s blogs and “commented back” from our blog by saying our thing in response to what the other blogger wrote. 

Blogging was how got to know each other. Blogging was how we learned about ourselves. Blogging was how we learned to be better lawyers.

Blogging was how we connected with people. Who knew – real authentic conversation from the heart connected us with folks – in many cases, prospective clients. 

Sometimes these virtual legal blogging communities formed around areas of practice, but often they formed by who we got to know as bloggers. No matter that a lawyer was doing energy law, they got to like the style of a white collar criminal defense lawyer and started to follow them, to read their stuff.

We took our blogging communities offline. We met for meet-ups before there ever was a MeetUp site. We got together for beers, some of the get togethers when I traveled and announced on my blog, come to this Irish pub and I’ll buy the beers – the advent of Beer for Bloggers. 

The value of our growing blog community wasn’t missed by the traditional legal publishers.  

More than idle conversation, as many unknowing lawyers looked at blogs back then, legal bloggers were advancing legal dialogue. They were reporting on the unreported. These legal bloggers had first hand experience with what they published. They cared deeply about the subjects of which they wrote. 

In November 2004,  journalist and entrepreneur, Lisa Stone, later a co-founder of Blogher, a blogging community and media company founded on the blogging of women, picked up on legal bloggers while at ALM in launching ALM’s Legal Blog Network as part of ALM’s Legal Blog Watch.

ALM’s blog network may have been small, but Stone had a good eye for legal bloggers –  Elefant and Ambrogi among them. Each still blogging and each leaving a significant mark on the law through their blogging and the podium blogging provided them.  

I shared Stone’s post on Twitter over three weekend, citing legal blogger, Eugene Volokh, that legal blogs were often more authoritative than traditional publishing:

To which Stone responded:

“Still do.” Kind of says it all.

Not long after ALM’s and Stone’s recognition of the publishing power of law blogs, Ed Adams, then editor and publisher of the ABA Journal, reached out to me. “What’s this legal blog network you’re blogging about?”

Adams wanted to see if the ABA could be apart of what would come to be LXBN (LexBlog Network). The ABA saw the journalistic integrity and had already started to recognize the best legal bloggers in their Blawg 100.

Fast forward fifteen years and we have thousands more legal blogs, offering legal insight and commentary on the law from experienced, caring and passionate lawyers.

Admittedly, there are spam blogs just trying to garner some SEO love and non-lawyers selling “blog content” to lawyers, but that doesn’t diminish the blog publishing of real lawyers. 

But it’s hard to find of all these lawyers and their blog publications. Bloggers aren’t often engaging each other. Some because they don’t care to and others because they don’t know who’s around them blogging.

The lack of community prevents collegiality, inspiration, learning and the attaboys and attagirls that bloggers deserve from time to time.

The lack of community into which the consumers of legal services (company or consumer) can look into impedes selecting the best lawyer in an informed fashion. 

LexBlog is taking a hard look at framing what we do as empowering a global legal blogging community. What it means. What it requires. How we use what have (it’s close to a community). How we measure success.

What do you think? Is a legal blogging community possible? Is it worthwhile for lawyers and the people we serve? What would it take? 

A community after all is about the people in it.

I was exchanging notes with a professional in the marketing, communications and publishing field who’s carved out a national reputation for her work.

She’s blogged some in the past, but as she began again, she felt intimidated by that next post – you know what do I say, what do I teach, what’s the message, how do I get beyond looking at this blank screen.

I suggested something that’s worked for me the last sixteen a years – as well for a lot of bloggers I learned from. Getting vulnerable, and to get comfortable in being vulnerable.

Getting vulnerable in blogging works. Just share what you are reading/seeing, why you are sharing it and what you learned from it.

You will “meet” the people whose items you share and draw a following of people who are attracted to an authentic voice who is sharing what they are learning and experiencing.

Everyone wants to tell the world what they know. Especially lawyers. 

But people want to see what you’re learning, what you’re thinking and who you’re meeting along the way. People want to see someone who’s different.

The world is full of bloggers “teaching” and “reporting,” all good, but it’s rare to see people blog today the way blogging began and thrived – as a conversation.

Listening to what and who interested you and entering the conversation by sharing what you thought, what it means and what you learned. The party on the other side – the person whose copy you shared and upon which you commented in your blog post hears you. Conversation and engagement – the stuff that life is made of ensues. 

Blogging then becomes easy – after you get the hang of this style – you’ll feel the desire to share as you read things. You’ll crank out your thoughts, including what you don’t know, in about 20 or 30 minutes. 

If you want help on this style of blogging, just holler. One of the things I miss today as we’ve grown is not talking with as many lawyers about how to connect with people through blogging.

As painful as it may be, and with the move comes declining ad revenue, eliminating a print edition may be the long term answer for most newspapers.  

Today, as reported by the New York Times’ Monica Davey and John Eligon, The Chicago Defender, the newspaper, that told the story of black life in America, will print its final edition.

“It took note of births and deaths, of graduations and weddings, of everything in between. Through eras of angst, its reporters dug into painful, dangerous stories, relaying grim details of lynchings, of clashes over school integration and of the shootings of black men by white police officers. Among a long list of distinguished bylines: Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.”“

The Defender will continue its digital operation. Per Hiram Jackson, chief executive of Real Times Media, which owns The Defender, the move allows the organization to adapt to a “fast-changing, highly challenging media environment that has upended the entire newspaper industry.”

“It is an economic decision,” Mr. Jackson told the Times, “but it’s more an effort to make sure that The Defender has another 100 years.”

Unlike the Defender, the Youngstown, Ohio daily of 150 years, The Vindicator just announced that it is closing its doors after 150 years. No print copy. No digital copy.

Margaret Sullivan, for the Washington Post, shared word of her story on the paper’s closing on Facebook. 

”The Vindicator, is about to shut its doors after 150 years. It’s been family owned for 132 of those years, and the family struggled with the decision, but ultimately felt they had no options. Years of losses and no end in sight — and then not a single interested buyer when the paper was put up for sale. It’s not only sad but something we’re going to see a great deal more of in cities across the country.”

I commented on Facebook that if newspapers like this one accepted disruption early on and moved more rapidly to a business model of digital only, it may give them a fighting chance.

Mark Brown, The Vindicator’s general manager spent $23 million to cover losses and to buy a new press in 2010. Admittedly the press was in hope of bringing in new revenue through outside printing, but by 2010 the handwriting was long on the wall that print was on the steep decline.

Investing in an outstanding digital publishing platform, perhaps a cost effective SaaS solution (WordPress?), and eliminating print may have been a better way to go. 

Ask the generations running the world today where they get their news. It’s on their phone and more often than not, on social media.

Ditching the print, realizing the declining revenue, and getting to digital built for social media may be a possible answer. Newspapers may even need to look to the aggregation of blog coverage and contributions from citizen journalists. 

Heck, I don’t have all the answers and have never worked for a newspaper, except for being a part-time paperboy, but holding onto paper as if it’s the primary means to share news is not working.

Newspapers were invented when we only had paper and ink. If iPhones existed, paper never would have been used.

Reading a post from Ms. JD’s Sonya Rahders announcing the winners of the 2019 Public Interest Scholarship Competition, I wanted to give a shout out to the law student winners and Ms JD for recognizing women in this regard. 

After all, the passion and commitment to public interest careers of these four scholarship recipients topped a large pool of highly competitive applicants.

But I did not. The reason being that the scholarship winners did not have Twitter handles. At least the first two I looked for when I was ready to give them all a kudos in a tweet. 

I pointed out the problem of legal professionals not having a Twitter handle when I was recognizing, via Twitter, the leading lawyers, and their message, on a conference panel.

Dennis Garcia, Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft, agreed and found it amazing many legal professionals were still not using Twitter.

Sure, you can tweet someone’s name without their Twitter handle, but it’s awkward – at best.

They don’t see the tweet, they don’t see the ongoing twitter thread – others recognizing them or a discussion about what they said, others cannot look up who they are by clicking on their twitter handle and what have you.

My response when ready to tweet something and finding the legal professional doesn’t use Twitter or make their Twitter handle readily available is to conclude the legal professional doesn’t use the Internet for learning and networking – they are far behind the curve or just don’t care.

I am not alone, LexBlog often does not share posts for which the source does not have a Twitter handle. LexBlog is not alone. You’ll never really find out who else thinks you are a little lame for not using Twitter and, as a result, doesn’t share your items or recognize you when recognition is due.

Sound harsh? Not really.

Journalism and media has changed with the net. If you are going to be out dialoguing and putting yourself in a place where you’ll be recognized – on or offline – others need your Twitter handle – bloggers, reporters and just other Twitter users.

“You can tell a lot about a person and how they think about their work based on whether or not they use “content” to describe what they do. A photographer who says that he is creating “content” for his YouTube channel is nothing more than a marketer churning out fodder to fill the proverbial Internet airwaves with marketing noise.”

This from longtime and widely respected, digital publisher, Om Malik in his newsletter this week. 

I’ve been thinking again about the word “content” as it refers to what we do as people – our art, our work.

“Content” seems an ill-chosen word for all net publishing. Do we call an artist’s work, content? A musician’s? An author’s? A columnist’s? A reporter’s?

A lawyer’s brief or memorandum their content filed with the court?

To refer to this work as content cheapens the person’s work. 

Om’s right:

“My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.””

When I started blogging and, shortly thereafter, LexBlog, I thought what a wonderful form of writing, of publishing, this blogging thing.

Our thoughts, insight, learning, passion and engagement on display for all the world to see.

We talked to each other, blog to blog. Never did we say, post some “content” to the web, we’ll lob some “content” back.

No gatekeepers as with magazines and journals. No where near the energy and stamina required when writing a book. But like a book, lawyers and I could learn, meet people and make a name for ourselves.

Whatever blogging was, it was different than writing articles. Certainly, no one used the term, “content marketing” back in the day.

Heck, why would we? We were giving of ourselves to help people and connect with those with whom we wanted to gain trust and get to know. Much more than “content” was in play.

Om’s hypothesis “content” relates to how the Internet has evolved into a highly quantifiable entity. 

Page views, eyeballs, social shares, comments, and ranking. Marketers and communication professionals, many producing good work, needed a word to tell customers what they were measuring. “Content” it was.

“But words matter, and we can choose which ones we use to talk about what we produce and the things we admire and cherish. I encounter so much imaginative work on the web, and I guess I just can’t help but be peeved when I hear it discussed (often by the creators themselves) as if it is essentially marketing copy.

And call me old fashioned, but I am happy to keep writing even if no “eyeballs” are watching!”

I guess I am old fashioned as well. I enjoy writing having no idea whether anyone is watching via stats, eyeballs et al.

What can legal bloggers and other professionals learn from a 97-year old retired nurse who recently took up blogging? Plenty.

After leaving the UW School of Nursing, Doris Carnevali, wanted to share what she was learning about aging. Rather than aging being a bad thing, she found it to be a learning experience, and a time for growth.

“I had been ranting about the fact that I thought aging had gotten a rotten deal. That it was much more pleasant, exciting, and challenging than I had been led to believe.”

The Dean of the UW Nursing School told her rather than to hold back on what she had to share, she ought to write about aging.

Her granddaughter suggested blogging and set up Carnevali on WordPress. Almost two years later, ‘Engaging With Aging’ has over 70 posts.

Some may call the blog more of a diary, but by sharing her experiences and what’s she learning Carnevali is publishing a lot of useful information for others. Inspiration as well. 

“My hands don’t pick up things the way I used to, do I say I’m losing my hands? No, I’m changing how I use them and that way I don’t get down in the dumps.”

“I’m still growing, I’m green, I’m inept, I’m clumsy, I’m learning every day, but I’m green, and I’m growing,” she told Ted Land of KING 5 News in Seattle, my source for this post. “I thought of aging as being grey, no, it’s green.”

Legal professionals can take a few things from Carnevali. 

One, blogging is for those who want to learn – to get better at what they do. Blogging, per Carnevali, keeps her sharp.

Two, blogging is about letting the knowledge and passion you have on your niche flow. Each morning, Carnevali sits at a desk and starts writing. “The ideas are bubbling in my head between the time I’m asleep and awake.”

And three, there will be days and weeks, when you don’t feel like blogging. “Sure, there are times when I am down, and the 14th thing I drop in a day makes me frustrated as all get out. But on the whole, it is so much more exciting than I ever thought it was going to be.”

Carnevali told Land she’s not afraid that there may come a day when she can no longer blog.

“When it happens, it happens, and it would be nice if it didn’t, but I’m too busy doing other things to worry about it right now.”

Professionals may think blogging is different for them than for a retired RN sharing her experience with aging.

It’s not. Passion, life long learning, and a willingness to share so as to help others — and perhaps leave a legacy are the same no matter your age or station in life.

A number of legal professionals use the on-line publishing platform, Medium, for the publishing of their articles. Many are attracted by the distrubution of their content to other relevant Medium users.

Plus this ditribution and the platform was free. No more.

Medium has shifted from a free and open publishing platform and community, to a paywall model where the content of publishers on Medium is only distributed to those who are paid subscribers to Medium.

Quincy Larson, founder of the web development community, freeCodeCamp (web development of millions) and one of the most-followed authors on Medium, with 158,000 followers, reports that Medium barely shows his articles to anyone.

How so?

“Medium has shifted to a paywall model where they mainly recommend paywalled articles, then encourage visitors to pay to get around their paywall.”

Checking Medium’s front page, Larson found three of four trending articles were paywalled. Non-paywalled articles no longer get recommended. 

“…[N]ot much of the traffic to Medium articles comes from Medium itself. Most of it comes from Google and social media.”

Legal professionals who see Medium as giving their content more distribution are kidding themselves.

“As of 2019, Medium won’t give you much “distribution” within their platform unless you’re willing to put your articles to be behind their paywall.

At the same time, if you do put your article behind their paywall, you’re limiting your readership to just the people who have the resources to pay.”

Wanting to make his articles and the learning resources of the freeCodeCamp community widely available, Larson moved off Medium.

Beyond distribution, Larson realized other signifcant benefits.

  • Faster site speed, something that’s a benefit for readers, something that means higher search rankings on Google and something that will result in appearing more often on social networks.
  • Full control of content and the publishing experience.
  • Better anylitics
  • A lot more readers.
  • Ability to publish more than just content, ie, audio and video.
  • Publish in any language

When Ev Williams, a co-founder of Blogger and Twitter, founded Medium seven years with the goal of an easy to use blog publishing platform with a community effect where users would recommend and share posts to other users.

A series of unsuccessful business models has now resulted in a paywall model where content is no longer shared and declining platform performance, as compared to other publishing platforms receiving upgrades and feature enhancements multiple times a year.

It’s hard to see Medium as credible publishing platform for legal professionals who are blogging or just looking to publish on an infreqeunt basis.

Loss of control of your content always made Medium questionable.

Now we have the paywall model, and the same game played by traditional legal publishers – write for us for the exposure and then we’ll move your content beyond a paywall. And in the case some legal publishers, delete the content altogether.