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Quality trumps quantity : Lesson for blogging lawyers from the New York Times

Author and lecturer, Seth Mnookin, has a lengthy piece in this edition of New York Magazine entitled The Kingdom and the Paywall.

It’s an excellent read on how Arthur Sulzberger Jr., The New York Times publisher and the chairman of the New York Times Company, is steering the Times towards profitability based on high quality content which subscribers must pay to access.

Mnookin highlights the struggle of pay versus free the Times faced when it came to the Internet.

For well over a decade, the Internet had been relentlessly consuming the paper’s business model. On the web, the saying went, information wants to be free; this left institutions like the Times, which invest huge sums in reporting the news, in an existential quandary.

The New York Times response to free at the same time it was losing money?

Sulzberger made what appeared to many to be a quixotic bet when the world looked like it was moving in the other direction.

The result?

Though the Times‘ circulation dipped during the crash years [credit crunch of 2008], much of the lost revenue was made up for by doubling the newsstand price, from $1 to $2–evidence, the paper insisted, that its premium audience understood the value of a premium product. In March, after several years of planning and tens of millions in investments, theTimes launched a digital-subscription plan–and the early signs were good. In fact, less than 48 hours before my interview, the Times announced it would finish paying back the [Mexican telecom mogul] Carlos Slim loan in full on August 15, three and a half years early. When they were released last week, the company’s second-quarter financial results showed an overall loss largely owing to the write-down of some regional papers, but they also contained a much more important piece of data: The digital-subscription plan–the famous “paywall”–was working better than anyone had dared to hope.

Sulzberger bet on quality over quantity.

The bottom line for the paywall is more than the bottom line: The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice.

All too many lawyers and law firms look at blogs as way to get traffic to their website. To grab mindshare.

The goal becomes quantity over quality. Big mistake.

My best friend, Doug, who sits on the La Crosse, Wisconsin City Council, told me a story about my father in law, Rich, who sat on City Council, with Doug for years. Doug said Rich didn’t speak that often, but when he did everyone sat up, took notice, and listened intently.

Interesting. The less you speak, the more people listen to you.

Think of a news or sports columnist you follow (or followed) in a newspaper or magazine. Did you hold it against him when they only penned a column once a month? Did you stop reading his stuff because he didn’t get mindshare by writing every week?

It’s the same with law blogs. Quality insight and commentary about legal developments or practical information your clients, prospective clients, and referral sources can use prevails over quantity.

Lawyer and author, Carolyn Elefant, shared that when lawyers blog on a niche, they can blog less often.

The reason? What the lawyer has to say is must have information and commentary for those the lawyer is trying to reach.

Don’t beat yourself up over not posting to your law blog all the time. Take a page from Arthur Sulzberger’s book. Quality trumps quantity.

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