Law Practice - May/June 2013

web 2.0

Additionally, each of the apps provides means to tweak and improve the content you receive (through adding favorites, “liking” articles, etc.), so the more you use the app, the more dialed-in the content becomes. I’d estimate that my app of choice (Zite, as of this writing) delivers content that I read about 90 percent of the time, far in excess of any of my old paper magazines.

Because users can constantly adjust the content, these new magazines also flexibly adjust to episodic interests. Planning a

EACH OF THE APPS
PROVIDES MEANS TO TWEAK
AND IMPROVE THE CONTENT
YOU RECEIVE, SO THE
MORE YOU USE THE APP,
THE MORE DIALED-IN THE
CONTENT BECOMES.

big trip to Napa? Add it as an interest to your app and it will pull from a variety of sources, such as Luxury Travel Magazine and Wine Spectator. Just elected managing partner of your firm? Add management as an interest and you’ll receive a stream of articles from business school journals and magazines. When the trip is over (or you can’t stand being managing partner one more second), you can remove those interests and add in new ones that reflect your next adventures.

SOCIAL SHARING

Even in retirement, my father-in-law maintains a keen interest
in business. He is my own personal clipping service, literally
clipping paper articles for me from the Wall
Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek and the Harvard Business
Review in a well-meaning but ultimately fruitless attempt to
improve my business acumen.

ALWAYS-ON PUBLISHING

Publishing paper magazines at regular intervals made sense when the technology couldn’t do any better, and so the magazine business model grew up around that limitation. The new magazine apps, unshackled from the need to print or ship, no longer have a reason to publish on such a schedule. New content is added continuously from all the sources a user selects. Not just every day, but every hour. The notion of waiting for the next issue is now quaintly Amish in flavor. (That’s pre–Amish Mafia, for the record.) This always-on publishing is a boon to readers such as myself not smitten with the charms of delayed gratification. It is also is a warning shot to any lawyer or law firm relying on Web publishing as a means of business development. Freshness and immediacy are highly valued in this setting, making the old academic saw—publish or perish!—distressingly relevant.

CONCLUSION

The magazine revolution offers great new opportunities for lawyers and law firms who want to step up their Web publishing, or just read great stuff that other folks publish. Check out Zite, Flipboard or Currents on your tablet computer today. LP