Blogging ain't dying among lawyers

When I first saw the New York Times story yesterday that blogs are waning as the young drift to other social media, I thought here we go go again.

Everyone’s going to start talking about blogs being passe now that you can Tweet in 5 seconds and share a quip on Facebook in 20. It’s a story that’s been told multiple times before and one that never proves to have legs.

Nonetheless, lawyers will start buying it and think they can skip over blogging as a means of publishing to enhance their reputations and build relationships and go straight to Twitter and other short form social media.

But then I saw what the Times cited as the basis of its article:

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier. Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

So kids and young people don’t have the attention span and motivation to publish. Older people do per the Times.

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

No surprise that lawyers and the audience they are engaging through blogging fall into the older age groups where blogs are on the rise.

LexBlog continues to see a significant increase in lawyers blogging. There are now over 5,000 lawyers blogging on the LexBlog Network.

123 of the 200 largest law firms in the U.S. publish blogs, up 27% over 6 months ending November, 2010. The number of blogs published by those law firms grew 30% in that same time frame. (See LexBlog State of the AmLaw 200 Blogosphere, November 2010)

So though blogging may be waning among our kids, blogging continues to see significant gains in the legal profession.