Posted by Orin Kerr:
Blawgs and the Populist Touch:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_15-2005_05_21.shtml#1116390283
Lincoln Caplan, editor of Legal Affairs, has an [1]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.
Are legal blawgs less populist than other types of blogs? Possibly.
But that's a possibility only because the audience makes it a
possibility. There are a lot of blog readers out there who are pretty
sophisticated on legal topics, and legal blogs can maintain a
high-level discussion with that audience that you generally can't find
in general circulation newspapers or magazines.
References
1. http://legalaffairs.org/issues/May-June-2005/editorial_mayjun05.msp
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