Legal blogosphere needs human edited newspaper or magazine

Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb points out the problem with the majority of the blogosphere being in the long tail. Many good blogs go unread.

Automatic aggregators, like Techmeme, end up acting somewhat like gated communities that are dominated by the biggest blogs — who link to one another and prop each other up. Paid syndication like Blogburst is hit or miss and also favors the more prominent bloggers who have name recognition.

A solution may be Brooklyn based The Issue which Catone describes as aiming ‘to bring the best of the wider blogosphere into focus via a daily, human edited online newspaper that aggregates quality blog content in a single place.’

The Issue is presented with a very clean, newspaper-esque design that organizes content into six main categories: US, world, business, science & health, art & culture, and musings (think: editorials). The paper also highlights a handful of ‘featured stories’ (major headlines) across multiple topic areas, and each day The Issue presents one ‘Issue of the Day,’ which it explores in depth with a handful of insightful posts.

We have a nice aggregation of law blog content at Justia’s BlawgSearch and the ABA Journal online. But we’re lacking a human edited vehicle that each day highlights featured stories and hot law blog discussion across various topics and locales.

Such a vehicle would allow us to consume law content at the increasing rate that it’s being produced. Something impossible today. It would also bring exposure to the excellent law blogs far down the longtail.

May take a joint effort of folks to get the job done but it’s necessary and is going to happen.