Could top law blogs move behind paywalls of large publishers?
Hours after losing its top policy blogger, Ezra Klein, the Washington Post announced yesterday a partnership with the popular law and public policy blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, founded by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh.
As a result of the move, The Volokh Conspiracy, its 12 authors, and vibrant commenting community will no longer be open to the net in six months, they’ll live behind the Washington Post paywall. You’ll be able to gain access from a .edu or .gov address, you’ll be able to get to 10 pages a month, and you’ll be able to get feeds via RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Otherwise you’ll need to have a paid subscription to the Post.
That’s better than the paywalls of legal publishers ala ALM or LexisNexis, but it’s still a paywall.
Volokh and his fellow bloggers on the Conspiracy will retain total editorial control, per his announcement of the move to follow the Amazon (Jeff Bezos recently bought the Post), and though sharing in some ad revenue, the authors expect to earn little.
Then why the move?
We think there’s a good chance that this joint venture with the Washington Post will help us find a broader audience for our ideas, while still keeping — we very much hope — all of you in our existing audience. And if you like our ideas, we hope that you’ll also value the possibility that those ideas will be spread more widely than before.
The move is not going over well on the legal blogosphere. From Scott Greenfield:
Over the years, I’ve come to think of Eugene and Orin Kerr as friends. Despite our different views of the law, I’ve come to respect and appreciate their posts and the ideas they’ve brought to the table. It’s been enriching for me. And in six months, I will be shut out.
Venkat Balasubramani doesn’t believe the Washington Post arrangment will work and that the blog will fragment with the authors going their separate ways.
One item not mentioned is the cost to keep the lights on at a widely popular blog. Hosting fees, software upgrades, security issues, and what not have to be taken into account. It’s not free to run a blog like the Conspiracy, let alone the author’s time. The Post is likely to underwrite all of that – exclusive of the authors time.
SCOTUSBlog was the first law blog to openly recognize such costs with its obtaining Bloomberg’s sponsorship. With the Bloomberg sponsorship coming to an end, SCOTUSBlog’s co-founder, Tom Goldstein, is seeking to sell the blog, with he and his co-reporters and publishers continuing to run the blog.
Volokh says he did his best to keep the blog as open as possible, but the Post would not concede more. Presumably because of ad and subscription revenues for the Post.
Is this where leading law blogs are going. Could SCOTUSBlog be headed to the Washington Post under similar access restrictions? Who knows?
Legal publications, traditionally, have been controlled by the few and sold back to the public. It’s also been traditional for authors to give their content to the legal publishers for free – for increased readership and to increase the influence of the authors.
Irony?