Legal journalism to be pro-am

Picking up on my post that legal news coverage is changing with the advent of blogs, Steve Mathews supports the concept that legal coverage is going to be a pro-am event.

…[I]t’s not going to be a matter of Lawyers ditching their day jobs to do this. But rather, an approach adjustment, made by those individuals who ‘get’ this new mode of profile marketing. If you truly are (or want to be) a ‘thought leader’ within your expertise or discipline, why wouldn’t you toss your commentary out to blogosphere? Your peers will pick it up, and so will the media. We’ve seen this much already…………[O]nce ‘citizen legal journalism’ gets going, Lawyers will be providing commentary on a huge range of topics. I can definitely see, especially with the influx of new law blogs and legal portals coming online, how valuable a marketing tool the legal blogoshpere is set to become.

Chris Anderson in The Long Tail wrote of amateur astronomers complementing professional observatories with their observations and posts so that together they found supernova that professional observatories would not have found on their own. The reason being that observations needed to be tracked around the world in physical locations where no observatory was located. The amateurs filled in the blanks.

Legal blogging, video blogging and podcasts are going to do the same thing. The day will soon be upon us when amateur legal publishers will fill in the blanks in a bankruptcy publication from LexisNexis’ Mathew Bender and blanks in New York law stories left uncovered by ALM’s New York Law Journal will be covered by lawyers.

Lawyers who will be amateur journalists and reporters will do so without quitting their day jobs. They’ll report because of the recognition they’ll receive, the passion for what they do, and the clients they’ll obtain as a result.

May not be the National Pro-Am of the Crosby at Pebble Beach, but a pro-am nonetheless.

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