An Editorial by Lincoln May Be Easier to Find Than a Legal Blog Post From 2005

Anna Trammell, writting for the Internet Archive Blog, shares that:

“Local news is disappearing. Since 2005, the United States has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers. 213 counties have no local news outlet at all and another 1,524 have just one. Newsrooms continue to shrink, close, and merge, often with no plan in place for the long term preservation and access of their archives. Online content that continues to be published by newsrooms is also at risk. According to the Pew Research Center, 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone and nearly a quarter of news webpages contain at least one broken link. The local record of our communities is vanishing in real time.”

Made me wonder whether a newspaper editorial by Abraham Lincoln as a Springfield lawyer is more likely to be found today than a blog post by an Illinois lawyer of twenty years ago.

The reason is that newspapers tend to be preserved in libraries, if not by the newspapers themselves. Legal blog posts and other digital insight gets preserved by chance. Such publishing is viewed by a law firm as content marketing with little or no value, long term, as secondary law. Plus, per Trammell’s point, digital news outlets, generally, do not preserve copy. Print has tended to.

Twenty years into the democratizing of legal professional publishing with the advent of legal blogs, there is a ton of insight from legal professionals. Over two million authoritative published works from what we have determined.

As a profession, it’s time to look at the real archiving of these works. For a lawyer’s legacy, for the advancement of this publishing as secondary law, for the education of AI, and for access to justice.