Lincoln Caplan, editor of Legal Affairs, has an essay on law-related blogs in the magazine’s lastest issue. Caplan suggests that law-related blogs are unusual because they lack the populist touch:
Most blawgers are law professors, lawyers, or law students and, reading what they post online, you realize that they’re not the uncredentialed challenging credentialed journalists, but credentialed lawyers (or lawyers-in-the-making) endeavoring to take back their subject from journalists and talking heads. While much of their content is gossip, a lot is commentary geared toward legal experts and virtually impenetrable for anyone else. Rather than being a populist advance, blawgs are often outlets for rarefied material.
Caplan continues:
You can herald blawgs as providing analysis, information, and opinion in a new form. You can dismiss some as a way for people with tenure and a lofty opinion of themselves to have their say in yet another forum. However you slot them, the impulse to blog often seems to be the opposite of the effect of blawgs. The key ones are efforts by lawyers and academics to be public voices, to matter outside the legal world, to connect. Yet while blawgs are blogs, they rarely have the populist touch that is supposed to make blogs blogs.
I wonder, though, who ever said that blogs are supposed to have the populist touch? What makes blogs blogs, I think, is that they have the touch of their individual (or in some cases collective) authors. While credentialed journalists have to speak to “the general public,” bloggers are free to speak to whatever segment of the Internet audience they want. Bloggers get to pick their audience, and each blog can be as broad, narrow, specialized or general as its author wants. The fact that lots of legal bloggers have chosen to address a pretty sophisticated and well-informed audience is part of what makes blawgs blogs.
UPDATE: Ernest Miller offers additional thoughts here.
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