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New to the Blawgosphere: Incisive's CEO
When William L. Pollak, CEO of legal media giant Incisive Media's operations in North America, launched Bill's blog, his thought was that it would be read only by the company's employees. But he soon realized, as he wrote there recently, that the blog is open to the world. "When we started our blogs, I was under the impression that these were somehow 'protected' but, alas, that's not true," he explained. "An intrepid Googler can find these words amidst the one trillion pages which the search engine has now indexed."
He has no problem with having his blog open to all, he wrote. "I was brought up with the maxim, 'don't do anything that you wouldn't want printed on the front page of The NY Times' firmly implanted in my brain." But he went on to wonder why anyone outside of Incisive would care about what he had to say.
Well, let me offer a couple thoughts about why outsiders might care. First off, Incisive is probably the largest legal media company in the United States. It owns Law.com and a network of regional and topical Web sites (as well as this blog). It publishes The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal,
Corporate Counsel, IP Law & Business, Law Technology News, and state and local legal newspapers around the country. At a time when both the legal industry and the news industry are in states of turmoil, the words of someone who is a leader in both industries are of great interest to many.
Second, Pollak has shown himself to have strong interest and great insight in the convergence of new media and traditional media. This, after all, is a CEO who tweets. On his blog, he occasionally shares his thoughts on social media and social networking. Of particular interest is an ongoing series of posts in which Pollak is discussing his ideas about how his company can use Twitter.
The focus, he said in the first of these posts, is on how Incisive can use Twitter to create "new opportunities for us to share, and even develop, our content in new ways and to extend our relationships to new audiences." In the second in the series, he offers tips on how to build up a following on Twitter. In his most recent post about Twitter, he talks about how legal journalists can use it in their work.
So here is the leader of the nation's largest legal journalism company, someone who is ahead of the curve in thinking about the interplay of traditional media and new media and their application to the legal profession, asking why anyone outside Incisive would care what he had to say. The answer is simple, I would suggest. When an industry leader speaks, people listen.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on March 27, 2009 at 02:49 PM | Permalink
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