Skip to main content

Syndication of Legal News

Legal News Syndication

What if there was legal news service, ala UPI, that syndicated legal news, information and commentary so that such news and commentary could be published by third-parties?

UPI (United Press International), founded in 1907, at its peak had more than 2,000 full-time employees, 200 news bureaus in 92 countries and more than 6,000 media subscribers, including newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations. 

As a kid I thought it incredibly neat that our local daily small town newspaper could pull and publish UPI stories and photos from around the world, in what looked like instantaneous fashion. 

Most of us who are old enough think Walter Cronkite broke the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. Not so, Cronkite got the news from UPI.

The essence of UPI, as well as AP and Reuters is syndication. Collect the news in various formats (text, audio and video) and syndicate it to those in the news business. 

With the decline in the traditional news business, these news services are no longer what that they used to be.

The legal news and journalism business is also on the decline.

  • With declining ad and subscription revenues, it is near impossible for traditional legal publishers to retain top reporters and editors.
  • Law firms are paying third parties to distribute the content published by their lawyers, with the third party often taking the Google search and social networking influence of the content. 
  • Third party publishers are asking legal professionals to write for them – for free – and for the third party publisher to retain ownership of the content and its original domain on the net.

What’s killing traditional legal journalism even more is the importance of the individual citizen journalist and what that citizen journalist should own and control in today’s Internet world.

Legal journalism has been democratized. 

  • Legal professionals have a printing press in their hands via a WordPress platform on a desktop or mobile device.
  • Legal professionals are reporting on law blogs – thousands of blogs with tens of thousand of bloggers, over 22,000 bloggers on LexBlog alone.
  • Legal journalism is now created by those in the know – practicing lawyers, law professors, law students and other legal industry professionals, all of whom have first hand knowledge and experience in niche areas.
  • Legal professionals can own and control their journalism (content and domain) without handing it to third parties for publishing or distribution, resulting in loss of influence caused by not having their domain be viewed as the primary domain.

With all of these law blogs, why not have a “UPI” syndicating this legal news and commentary?

The content could be syndicated to subscribers licensing a “syndication portal” displaying the stories the subscriber saw as relevant. 

Subscribers could include associations, law firms and other organization who had a ready reason to license a “syndication portal,” whether it be for member relationships, brand building or otherwise. 

Content could also be syndicated in niche focused “magazines” comprised primarily of syndicated legal news and commentary.

Most important in such legal syndication is it being all about the individual law blogger, not the third party publisher as in days past.

A hub for legal blogs with accompanying technology for “syndication portals” could make legal news syndication a reality. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Job security is a myth for lawyers without a personal brand

I talked with a highly respected legal professional last Friday who was recently let go by his law firm. He had been employed by the firm for four or five years and employed by similar large law firms for a couple decades before. A couple weeks ago I heard of veteran lawyer who joined a large firm with a major client, but whose employment status was now at risk with the general counsel’s leaving his client. These stories pale in comparison to all of the lawyers who have been the victim of downsizing caused by the collapse or merger of their law firms. With the changes in the legal services market, very few lawyers have job (or stable income) security  writes Dan Lear, Director of Industry Relations at Avvo. Lawyers need to build a strong brand or a business, and to do so now, Per Lear, the job security once held by law firm partners and in-house counsel who had reached the the ranks of Assistant General Counsel or Deputy General Counsel is gone. There’s the former general counse
Post a Comment
Read more

The economics of a legal blogging network as a virtual community

Over twenty years ago I read of the power of virtual communities in Net Gain, Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities by John Hagel and Arthur Armstrong (now executive director of Debevoise &Plimpton). I read  Net Gain  then while creating Prairielaw.com, a virtual law community of lawyers and lay people alike, later sold to LexisNexis. I am reading Net Gain again as LexBlog’s worldwide legal blogging network begins to pick up steam. This legal blogging network is every bit a virtual community of: Blogging legal professionals Those supporting these legal bloggers – LexBlog and its partners Those whom benefit from the legal information and commentary of legal bloggers, including legal professionals, consumers of legal services empowered by legal blogs to select a lawyer in a more informed fashion, and other publishers who receive blog commentary by syndication. No question there is a business model in organizing a legal blogging community, so long as the focus rema
Post a Comment
Read more

Blogging Makes You a Better Lawyer

LexBlog’s associate editor, Melissa Lin , shared on Twitter this week a blog post of mine on some of the reasons that lawyers blog – to learn, to join a conversation and to build a community. To which Josh King , the former general counsel of Avvo and the current general counsel of realself  added, “Also makes you a better lawyer. Also makes you a better lawyer. — Josh King (@joshuamking) September 27, 2019 I have been following King’s blog for years. He has a keen interest in the professional speech regulation of lawyers, and how that regulation may not serve the public interest. I’ve watched him pick up relevant news stories, whether from traditional media or legal bloggers, dissect the issue, analyze the law and share his commentary. Good stuff. I engaged him and others on many of his posts. King was doing exactly one of the things we were told in law school, and which the consumer of legal services would like to see in their lawyer, he was staying up to speed in relevant
1 comment
Read more