Only 8% under age 35 to rely on newspaper for news : Law firm PR has got to change
Picked up from The New Yorker, via Pat Thornton, that per a recent study, 39% of those under 35 said that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper (‘Abandoning the News,’ published by the Carnegie Corporation). More shocking is that only 19% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 claim even to look at a daily newspaper.
That ought to send shock waves through large law firms with expensive PR and communication programs designed to get their lawyers quoted in print. Unfortunately it’s not.
I continue to run across law firm heads who know little about online publishing – unless you count archiving old articles and newsletters on websites. Chief Marketing Officers and PR heads in large law act like blogs, by far and away the largest producer of online niche news & information, are for kids. Mention RSS and newsreaders, the way innovative business people and reporters syndicate and receive news, and I’m told that’s too techie, we’re not into that stuff around here.
Even worse is that there’s little being done in large law to adapt. Marketing and communication heads hire outside agencies they’re comfortable with, often whom have no experience or taste for online publishing through blogs and RSS. Heck, some PR agencies representing law firms have a conflict of interest in seeing such new ways of PR work, they’d be out of a job.
Although there’s some education in the legal marketing profession on new methods of PR, there’s not enough. I’m amazed when I get out and speak that legal marketing professionals know little about the subject and ask me why thete’s not more people presenting on the topic.
As The New Yorker’s Eric Alterman wrote about the web, ‘[Content] distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap.’ That’s why individual lawyers in large law firms who are publishing blogs are garnering significant press. Being quoted in two to three stories a month is not unusual.
Law firms need to wake up. Those who do will hold a significant competitive edge.