Every once in awhile, it pays to stand back and reflect for a moment
on the "Adam Smith, Esq." community—yes, dear reader,
that means you.
The more involved I’ve become with "Adam Smith, Esq.," and the more
readers I’ve heard from and even met in the real world, the more
I’ve come to think of it not as a "blog" but as a publication, with
all of the responsibility for accuracy, even-handedness, and citation
of original source material, that that entails. As the managing
partner of an AmLaw 25 firm said to me, "The difference between you
and The American Lawyer is that you publish a couple of
dozen times a month." [And there’s a nontrivial difference
in the cost of a subscription, but I chose to be kind and avoid pointing
that out.]
Have I, then (horrors!), become "Mainstream Media"?!
Wrong question, at least if you believe David
Sifry, founder and
CEO of Technorati, the first
and in many ways still the best search engine dedicated to blogs. In
a thoughtful and, blessedly, data-rich post,
Sifry points out that some famous blogs, including the ubiquitous
Boing Boing, have professional journalists on staff. Other
sites which he classifies as "MSM," including Slashdot, let readers
spontaneously create and populate their content.
The point is that the line between the MSM and the blogosphere is
blurring, particularly as we gain more experience with what I think
of as "Blogs 2.0:" Sites, like "Adam Smith, Esq.,"
that are professionally produced, directed at a focused target audience,
and (so people tell me) offer content equivalent in quality and analytic
rigor to anything to be found offline in more conventional media
addressing the same topics.
That said, blogs are never going to supplant The New York Times or CNN, as
this handy little graphic makes clear:
It’s also overly simplistic to conclude, as the hypothesis
of "The Long
Tail" would
have it, that you’re either on the A-List, read by millions, or you’re
nowhere. Going just a very short distance further down
the popularity distribution curve shows blogs gaining a lot of real
estate on the MSM:
Sifry calls sites that are neither on the A-list nor
irrelevant The Magic Middle of the attention curve:
"This realm of publishing highlights some of the most
interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often
writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and
Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch
on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on
knitting, or Stereogum on music – these are blogs that are interesting,
topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing
the economics of trade publishing. […]"And what is so interesting
to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these
blogs often are. "
So it’s official: You are a subscriber in good standing to
"The Magic Middle." And "Adam Smith, Esq." is a publication
in every sense intended by that moniker.
The statement “blogs are never going to supplant The New York Times or CNN” is based only on current trends and reality. Blogs are improving in quality and are adequately specializing. NYT and CNN are old hat, static and unresponsive media. The latter may stay for much longer or may deteriorate quite fast.
Blogs already provide alternatives such as opinion, culture, quality writing and personality totally lacking in the uniform, to me, maddening mediocrity of the general media.
You missed something impossible to measure.
When The American Lawyer publishes “X is important,” a hundred thousand lawyers collectively mumble mmm-hmm.
When Bruce MacEwen writes “X isn’t important because of Y and Z, but make sure you keep in mind A,” ten thousand lawyers set the coffee down, put the reading glasses on, and make the phone hold for a minute.
The real power of blogs is in credibility and personality. “The American Lawyer” is an institution known for mixing quality articles about the legal professional with generalized fluff, same as any magazine.
Bruce MacEwen is a smart guy who knows something about big firm management who writes frequently and writes well. I don’t have some vague respect for the place he works at. I respect him. If I see him write something, I will stop and pay attention. If someone wants to disagree, they’ve got a big mountain of credibility to climb up first.
I can see why big firms don’t “get” blogs since they live their lives in an institutional world. But ask a small firm or solo practitioner about the importance of personal credibility and reputation and they’ll tell you their career lives and dies on it. The American Lawyer could survive an incompetent or corrupt editor or writer, but Bruce MacEwen couldn’t. Correspondingly, if Bruce MacEwen proves time and again that he’s a smart, informed commentator, he’ll be more credible than any mere institution.
Here’s a blog example: a few months ago, a few reporters and editors at the Washington Post grumbled that Dan Froomkin’s blog shouldn’t be called the “White House Briefing” because it wasn’t a normal journalistic summary of the days events, it was a blog that linked to a wide variety of materials.
The Washington Post was blasted for days by thousands of comments on their message boards. Not profanity-laden rants. Intelligent, insightful comments with ample evidence of the problems of the Washington Post and the hypocrisy of their position.
The Washington Post accelerated their credibility spiral downward by shutting the boards entirely.
Dan Froomkin emerged unscathed, with the added credibility of a strong network of supporters.
When I’m trying to figure something out, I pay attention to what the people I trust say to me about it, not the garbled and bleached result of an institutional process. The advertisements say people “trust” their media institutions. Some people do. I don’t. I trust people. And I’m not alone. That’s where the power of the blogs lies.