What We’re Reading – Newspaper revenue falls off cliff: Opportunity for law firms

I encourage you to read Kevin O’Keefe’s recent blog post relating the steep decline in newspaper revenue to the advent of blogging. He cites NYU professor and recognized media authority Jay Rosen, who believes that “newspaper advertising peaked the year blogging became an option.”

Why should legal marketers care about this? As Kevin shares, there are basically two reasons:

Blogs are powerful. The combo of focused niche subject area content and its being authored by someone deeply interested in that area provides content-consumers with a quick deep-dive into detailed and authoritative information.

Big opportunity for attorneys. Attorney-generated content drives new business. A recent study by Greentarget found, “Seventy-six percent of [outside counsel] say they attribute some level of importance to a lawyer’s blog when deciding which firms to retain.”

The big takeaway from Kevin’s piece is that lawyers, as subject matter experts, are perfectly situated to take advantage of the changing media landscape. But I think that blogs are just one of many tools that attorneys can use to share their ideas. Videos, whitepapers, podcasts and presentations are also effective.

Whatever the method, for attorney-generated content to yield results, it needs to be easily found, easily shared and easy to read. Some of our thoughts on how this can be accomplished can be found here.

As the value of attorney-generated content increases, firms that think like publishers will out-maneuver their competition in acquiring the attention of potential clients.