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May 1, 2006
The Puzzling Case of "Mixed" Lawprof Blogs
Larry says that mixed blogging will confuse (and therefore put off) serious scholars, who mostly want their meat without the potatoes. He also says that mixed blogging will likely fail ("tend to fade away," in his words) because it will not be rewarded by administrators, and scholars will not want to spend their time on things that aren't rewarded.
My reaction to Larry's arguments is both agreement and disagreement.
On the one hand, I suspect that Larry is quite right about how and why many academics pay attention to certain things and don't pay attention to others. I'll be personal about this -- this is, after all, a "mixed blog" that often includes personal stuff -- and cite my own blogging as an example. I've been blogging since January of 2003; when I started, I was one of the first handful of lawprofs in the gig. My blog has done pretty well by lots of the usual objective measures, and I frequently blog about law and legal (especially civil rights) history. Yet I have some reason to believe that I'm not really seen as a lawprof blogger at all.
I think my case shows pretty clearly that Larry is at least partly right: I suspect that many lawprof blog readers (and perhaps judges and law clerks and attorneys and other consumers of legal scholarship) don't really know quite what to make of my blog – frankly, I myself often don't – and therefore maybe don't even think of me as a lawprof blogger. It probably doesn't help, either, that a good deal of my "serious" scholarly blogging is about a topic – legal history, specifically the legal history of the Japanese American internment – that legal scholars are likely to place in a "something other than law" bin. So – and I'm just guessing here, but I think this is probably somewhere near correct – the position (or comparative lack thereof) of IsThatLegal in the lawprof blogosphere tends to demonstrate Larry's thesis that academics get a bit confused when they encounter a blog that mixes in a lot of "other stuff" (politics and humor and personal musings) with its scholarly posts, especially if those scholarly posts don't shout that they are conventional, straight-up-the-middle legal scholarship. I suspect that this blog's experience tends to demonstrate that lawprof bloggers pay attention mostly to the blogs that do not present these ambiguities and that give them what they're looking for more efficiently.
Yet on the other hand, Larry is also partly wrong about "mixed" blogs by law professors. Consider Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Steve Bainbridge, and Eugene Volokh. Glenn and Eugene got into the blogging biz before I did; Ann and Steve got into it after. Each of these bloggers blogs about a wide variety of things. Glenn (who is, admittedly, something of a special blogging case (and I mean that in a good way)) almost never blogs about law. Ann blogs about a dizzying array of things; only very rarely does she post something that would appeal to scholars in her academic field(s). Eugene and Steve both do more blogging in their areas of expertise than Ann or Glenn, but both of them also blog extensively about other things (Eugene about, for example, politics and sex and vacuum cleaners and language and lots of other stuff; and Steve about, for example, religion (specifically Catholicism), wine, and culture). The blogs of each of these lawprofs is likely to be confusing and inefficient for academic readers in the very ways that Larry Solum describes. Yet they flourish; indeed, their blogs are by any measure "important" blogs, and not just outside legal academia. Lawprofs who read blogs are likely, at least periodically, to read these blogs.
Now I will be the very first to admit that one thing that might distinguish my "mixed blogging" from theirs is that they do it better – more interestingly, or more brilliantly, or more eccentrically, or more entertainingly, or more eloquently, or sometimes (though not always) more frequently – than I do. (Note to snarky would-be commentators: I've said it, so you don't have to!)
But I note one additional distinction: these highly successful "mixed" lawprof bloggers all blog from, and to a readership primarily on, the political right. (I usually find Ann's blogging to be a bit more up-the-middle than do many, but a recent poll shows that her readership is far more to the right than the left of the political center.) (And I confess that I'm not a regular enough reader of Steve Bainbridge's to be completely certain that he's to the right of center, but my impression from his blogging during the campaign season is that this is true.)
The couple of genuinely "mixed" lawprof bloggers to the left of center – I'm thinking, I guess, mostly of myself and Michael Froomkin, and I'd probably throw in Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Profs as well -- don't hold a candle to their readership or their influence.
What do I make of that? To be honest, I don't really know. I certainly don't think the legal academy is skewed towards a Republican/conservative viewpoint; it isn't.
The preeminence of right-of-center "mixed" lawprof bloggers may, however, reflect an overall blogospheric tilt to the right; look at the TTLB ecosystem's ten "Higher Beings" and you'll see that seven are blogs from the right, whereas only two are blogs from the left.
Or maybe it reflects something else entirely. I'd be curious to know what you think.
In any case, Larry's thesis – that lawprof bloggers who blog about law as well as lots of other stuff will confuse their readership and drive them away, and that their blogs will therefore fade away – appears to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Something surely explains why certain "mixed" lawprof blogs are among the most successful blogs in the blogosphere, even among lawprofs and other consumers of legal scholarship, and something surely explains why right-of-center ones do a whole lot better than left-of-center ones.
Posted by Eric at May 1, 2006 10:06 AM
Comments
You raise interesting questions. I try to keep the focus of Feminist Law Profs on issues related to law, culture and gender and/or sexual orientation. I'd like to draw more law profs into active participation on the blog, and I'd narrow or widen the scope of coverage if I thought it would help accomplish this. Any suggestions? I really do want to serve the feminist law prof community, though. Having a "big" blog doesn't really interest me. I get enough hate e-mail already!
Posted by: Ann Bartow at May 1, 2006 11:32 AM
From an outsider's perspective, I'd call it the think-tank effect. Right-wing foundations pour money into having hacks, including lawyers, pumping out punditry. And that trickles down to blogs too, even just in terms of visibility. There's very little sort of that promotion on the left. Most (not all, but most) of the left blog activity is on extracting money from the grassroots, as opposed to spending money on position promotion.
There's also the Libertarianism aspect. Ideological Libertarians may not have much power in the real world - but on the Net, they are LOUD.
It's power in action.
Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at May 1, 2006 12:30 PM
I'd dispute the "blogospheric tilt to the right." There's a persuasive analysis of why here. Less esoterically, while figuring out the popularity of a particular blog is of course a notoriously difficult question, there are other measures than the TTLB system.
SiteMeter presents a very different picture.
Kos is a good example. Instapundit gets about 120,000 visitors a day according to SiteMeter; Daily Kos gets almost 500,000. Atrios gets 130,000 a day, or 10,000 more than Instapundit, but is not even a TTLB "Higher Being."
Changing gears to law blogs specificlly, it occurs to me that while there may be more popular right lawprofs who blog than left lawprofs, here are certainly left lawyers who are more popular than the right lawprofs. TalkLeft (about 18,000) gets about 10,000 more visitors a day than Althouse and 14,000 more than Bainbridge, going by SiteMeter. Volokh gets more than Talk Left by about 3,000, but Firedoglake -- a very "mixed" blog with one lawyer as a main contributor and many lawyers doing guest posts -- gets 77,000 a day, or about 55,000 more than Volokh. (Glenn Greenwald doesn't seem to have SiteMeter, but I'd guess he's at least as popular as Volokh.)
I think the left/right distinction in popularity you see might hold for lawprof blogs, but certainly not for blogs with a legal focus. And to be honest, I doubt if most consumers of blogs draw a sharp distinction between lawyer and lawprof blogs in terms of the content provided.
As for the lawprofs, well, academics and professionals of a similar level (journalists, especially) tend to dominate the blogosphere. Atrios is a PhD; Kos, remember, is himself a lawyer, though he doesn't practice.
Food for thought, perhaps. I just think there's a wider picture here to consider.
Posted by: Thers at May 1, 2006 3:09 PM
If we're going to take academic blogging seriously (I'm not a lawblogger, but I think these are a subset [with special characteristics] of academic/professional blogs) we have to, first and foremost, abandon linkage and traffic as measures of anything....
Then we can start talking about quality and substance issues.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at May 1, 2006 5:34 PM
i'd posit that right-leaning blogs garner higher readership than left-leaning blogs because left-leaning readers are more likely to read blogs that run counter to their political bent than are right-leaning readers. that is, the right-leaning blogs get righties and lefties, while the left-leaning blogs get pretty much only lefties.
of course, being a lefty myself, i also like to think lefites are more open-minded than righties.
Posted by: jenny at May 1, 2006 6:43 PM
It's that dog, Eric.
(I'm kidding, of course.)
Posted by: modus potus at May 1, 2006 7:42 PM
Hi, I'm a regular reader of Althouse's blog, followed the link. As a person kicking around the idea of starting a blog (not in law, but in physics, and science in general), it's always interesting to hear about how blogs and academia interact.
Posted by: altoids at May 1, 2006 7:58 PM
Your site and Froomkin's are both good, but neither of you posts very often. It's new content that drives readership numbers (at least, that's my guess). (I'm a right-winger, BTW.)
Posted by: Thomas at May 2, 2006 12:11 AM
dresner, it may be the case that blogs of worth should pay no attention to their popularity and focus on substance, but that's an academic's way of being insular as well. the simple fact is that most people don't read legal monographs and festschrifts, they read people and time. blogs are an effective way to reach both the substance-concerned readers, and those who want flash, simplicity, and snark. there is no reason at all why you can't "mix" topics on a blog, blogs are by definition nonuniform. if i want to talk about my garden in between 100 posts on various legal and political topics (as i recently did) my readers won't complain and in fact will enjoy the variation.
Thers beats me to it, btw. righty legal blogs may have more of an impact on various legal or scholarly communities, but those numbers Thers posted tell a more important story. just as i really don't care how influential a wingnut journalist is on the DC cocktail party circuit, i also don't care who is Hot Shit in the academic/legal community. i care about who is getting something done, which right about now means doing something about declarations like this.
blogs aren't a threat to the Academe unless the Old Timers are stupider than they were when i left it. your students can explain it to you if you need help wrapping your brain around it- the Academe will change, and if you don't want to work for the University of Phoenix, you should embrace those changes now.
Posted by: chicago dyke at May 2, 2006 8:39 AM
In response to two commenters:
1. The notion that right-wing foundation money is "trickling" down such that it inflates blogger readership is so unsubstantiated as to be frivolous.
2. Daily Kos has "500,000" readers -- what does this mean? Unique visitors? Does it account for the fact that some commenters will click on the website 50 or 100 times a day to keep up with a discussion thread? And keep in mind that Kos isn't a single blog; it's a conglomerate. Think how big Instapundit's "readership" would be if he hosted a few hundred other bloggers on the instapundit.com domain.
Posted by: Niels Jackson at May 2, 2006 10:06 AM
Niels, Yes, Kos gets a lot of repeat hits, but SiteMeter doesn't count that way; clicking repeatedly to refresh a comments thread doesn't count as multiple visits. And I was giving visits -- not page views.
Yes, Kos uses Scoop -- but that obviously foxes the TTLB ecosystem, too, because all those hundreds, even thousands of diarists obviously aren't blogrolling what is essentially their own site. At any rate I'd bet that, yes, almost all of the Kos diarists do read Kos as well, so I don't see your point about how the fact that he hosts diarists as well overinflates his readership. I doubt that there are all that many Kos diarists who don't regularly read the main page.
Like I said, of course there is no very reliable way to measure readership on the Web. But using just the TTLB ecosystem as a measure is clearly insufficient, and other measures certainly show that the left blogosphere is larger than the right.
It can also be pointed out that many of Kos's front page posters are lawyers, like Armando. So That would be further evidence that while right lawprofs might have an edge over left lawprofs in blogland, left lawyers clearly have a huge advantage over right lawyers.
Posted by: Thers at May 2, 2006 2:37 PM
If I set up a traditional blogroll at Feminist Law Professors and convinced all the blogrollees to link reciprocally, the TTLB score would go way up. But that wouldn't make it a better blog.
If I started a flame war with either right wingers or the illiberal/antifeminist left, visits would go way up, but again, I question how much value that would add to the blog.
I get kind of tired of the endless rat-race of quantitative metrics in legal academia, but of course the same folks who push this stuff elsewhere will do so with law prof blogs.
How do the advertisers measure the audience or prominence of blogs?
Posted by: Ann Bartow at May 2, 2006 3:18 PM
Competitive exclusion? I've always had the impression that right-of-center readers were a little more hungry for general interest blogs, while left-of-center readers wanted more in the way of red meat. Maybe left-of-center readers find the general interest niche already served in the mainstream media or NPR.
In my experience, it seems like even explicitly political blogs with right-of-center readers get pushed toward the general interest content. Witness NRO's Corner blog, which on a typical day will have almost half the posts in a "general interest" vein.
Posted by: Zach at May 2, 2006 11:35 PM