Legal Affairs, Blawgs, and Populism
June 12, 2005
Lincoln Caplan, the head honcho at Legal Affairs, had this to say about blawgs:
A generation ago, the goal of influential forms of journalism was to make the news broadly accessible and give us a common basis for making social choices. Journalism about the law shared those aims.
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The key [blawgs] 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.
Of course, in his column, Mr. Caplan didn't mention the irony in his criticism of blawgs: At $49.99 a year, even many law professors can't afford Legal Affairs. But the only thing you need to buy before reading blawgs is a thinking cap - and those are free!
So who's not populist?