Legal blogs take legal reporting to a new level
Adam McDowell of Canada’s National Post writes this morning about ‘How blogs like Torontoist and BlogTO are taking local news to a new level.’
Reminds me that legal blogging, when done well, can take legal reporting to a whole new level. Wether it be as to niche areas of the law or a geographic locale.
Marc Lostracco, one of the editors of Torontoist, a website about Toronto and everything that happens in it, says their strength is in our writers having their ears to the ground. Wow, that’s exactly the same for lawyers and legal blogging.
What makes legal blogs so go good are lawyers having their ears to the ground. Who better to offer legal insight and commentary than a lawyer dealing with the issues day in and day out. Lawyers feel the pain of their clients. They appreciate the needs of their clients, whether consumers or corporations. As such, lawyers are better equipped to analyze and report stories than reporters calling upon a lawyer for a quote or resources.
Like reporters, I get news tips and story ideas for my reporting. I can turn to a Twitter following, comprised of thousands of people in the know, for information and resources. I suspect it’s the same for other legal bloggers.
Like BlogTO and Torontoist, legal blogs enjoy readership in the hundreds of thousands per month. In time, legal blogs will rival mainstream media coverage of the law. In some cases they already do.
A commenter to McDowell’s story hit on another reason for the demand for niche reporting by blogs. Our demand for quality information is ever increasing.
Our society’s lust for information is creating a need for news that the mainstream media has failed to pick up on.
We go to the net for everything we want to know. We want the info to be good. We want to info to be from someone with expertise.
We have a long way to go in legal reporting via blogs. It’ll take educating lawyers as to the opportunities for practice and client development that lie with blogging. It’ll take bringing legal blog content together on networks, with editorial review, such as LexMonitor. But there’s no question that blogs are taking legal reporting to a new level.