Journalism

Coming in 2019 – Above the Law Influencers Network

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The average American adult spends more than 11 hours consuming digital media each day. Simultaneously, our attention span has diminished below eight seconds – equivalent to that of a goldfish. This is why every single legal media brand, and your uncle, is producing content.

Over the years, Above the Law (ATL) has expanded its coverage to meet this need. Our five editors publish, share, argue, and defend takes on the news that matters to lawyers and the legal industry. Our network of 100+ expert columnists shares ground-level viewpoints on law practice, law school, law firm management, in-house counsel, the business of law, technology and innovation, emerging practice areas, government, the courts, and public interest. Today, we curate and publish approximately 20 original articles per day, for an average of 10,000,000 pageviews and 1,300,000 unique readers per month. David, Elie, Staci, Joe, and Kathryn have built the largest distribution platform in the legal industry, and they do it every single day, month, and year.

We also understand the limits of the industry we serve. There are only 1,300,000 lawyers in the US, and 150,000 law students. There are only 24 hours in a day, and someone has to bill time. Our editors will continue the daily fight for media and distribution dominance, and we will deepen our focus into heavily-researched journalism and editorial to strengthen our relationships with readers.

In 2019, Above the Law will launch the ATL Influencers Network. The Influencers Network will provide a platform for legal industry thought leaders to:

  • Publish long-form editorial projects on the largest distribution platform in the legal industry,
  • Utilize the ATL research team’s capabilities with surveys, data collection, mining, and analysis,
  • Leverage the ATL editorial team’s storytelling expertise.

ATL Influencers will receive a column on Above the Law, payment for their work, and the opportunity to earn more money with Above the Law sponsored editorial and custom projects.

The ATL Influencers Network will be limited to 10 Influencers in its first year. Our influencers will be passionate about, and interested in building, an editorial projects in the following areas:

  • alternative legal service providers
  • big data, data analytics
  • business of law and law firm economics
  • emerging practice areas
  • in-house practice and operations
  • law firm innovation and change management
  • legal education for law students, and pre-law students
  • legal technology
  • legal research
  • solo and small law firm practice management

If you are interested in participating, please email Brian Dalton, VP of Special Projects bdalton [at] breakingmedia.com.

A Most Appealing Announcement

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If you’re like me, you’ve been reading Howard Bashman’s excellent appellate litigation blog, How Appealing, for years. When I started to write online more than a decade ago, Howard, a pioneer of legal blogging, was a role model and inspiration. (I pay homage to Howard Bashman and How Appealing with shout-outs in my forthcoming novel.)

Given our longtime admiration of Howard Bashman and How Appealing here at Above the Law, we are absolutely delighted to announce this partnership: effective October 1, 2014, How Appealing will be hosted at howappealing.abovethelaw.com. You can read Howard’s announcement of the affiliation here.

For those of you who love How Appealing and Above the Law as they are, there’s nothing to fear. Howard Bashman will continue to run the web’s top blog devoted to appellate litigation, and we will continue to cover the legal profession here at ATL in our inimitable style. We will display headlines of recent How Appealing posts on ATL, and How Appealing will display headlines of recent ATL posts. The primary change resulting from this partnership will be felt by advertisers, who will now enjoy a broader range of options within the Breaking Media family. If you are interested in advertising on How Appealing, Above the Law, or both, please contact [email protected].

Given How Appealing’s record of excellence dating back to 2002, we couldn’t be happier with this partnership. We look forward to working with Howard Bashman and How Appealing in the years ahead.

Announcing the new location of “How Appealing” [How Appealing]

David Lat is Managing Editor of Above the Law, a Breaking Media site.

In Talking About State-Supported Media, The Form Can’t Be Separated From the Funding

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Bollinger, the 19th president of Columbia University

It says a lot about how bad things are that in today’s Wall Street Journal Columbia University President Lee Bollinger tried to make a case for a government funding in news media.

His specious logic rests on the fact that Americans — “ironically,” in a misuse of the word — already consume state-supported news in the form of PBS and NPR here, and the BBC, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV abroad and that all is well with that arrangement. It’s near impossible to get past the holding up of an official Chinese news source as an example of a flourishing press, but there’s more if you can control your laughter…

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Why Is The Market For Journalists and PR People So Inefficient?

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Can anyone explain to me why the recruitment market for entry- and early-mid-level journalists, and public relations people is still so insanely inefficient?

I used to think it was just me who had to dig for days to turn up a single good candidate. Maybe, I just didn’t know where to look. Maybe, as editor of Ad Age, or editor-in-chief of Breaking Media, I just wasn’t offering sexy enough jobs, after all the jobs I was looking to fill definitely required some business reporting skills. But over the last couple of years I’ve had the discussion with countless editors and publishers. In just the last month I’ve spoken to the editor of a section of a major national newspaper, the editor of a pretty-damn sexy magazine/web brand and a couple of editors of online properties, all of whom have been struggling to find the right candidate.

You might think that this makes sense. Maybe students have been forced into a sad-but-probably-practical conservatism by the pay-for-play education in this country, and are simply deciding not to rack up monstrous debts in an effort to join a poor-paying profession in which the largest employers have been cutting their staffs every year for a decade. But that’s not it. In fact, even in the mainstream-media maelstrom of 2009, the J-schools continued to report increased applications and graduate numbers have tended to tick up in recent years too.

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