"The Magic Middle"

Every once in awhile, it pays to stand back and reflect for a moment on the "Adam Smith, Esq." community—yes, dear reader, that means you.

The more involved I've become with "Adam Smith, Esq.," and the more readers I've heard from and even met in the real world, the more I've come to think of it not as a "blog" but as a publication, with all of the responsibility for accuracy, even-handedness, and citation of original source material, that that entails.  As the managing partner of an AmLaw 25 firm said to me, "The difference between you and The American Lawyer is that you publish a couple of dozen times a month."  [And there's a nontrivial difference in the cost of a subscription, but I chose to be kind and avoid pointing that out.]

Have I, then (horrors!), become "Mainstream Media"?!

Wrong question, at least if you believe David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, the first and in many ways still the best search engine dedicated to blogs.  In a thoughtful and, blessedly, data-rich post, Sifry points out that some famous blogs, including the ubiquitous Boing Boing, have professional journalists on staff.  Other sites which he classifies as "MSM," including Slashdot, let readers spontaneously create and populate their content. 

The point is that the line between the MSM and the blogosphere is blurring, particularly as we gain more experience with what I think of as "Blogs 2.0:"  Sites, like "Adam Smith, Esq.," that are professionally produced, directed at a focused target audience, and (so people tell me) offer content equivalent in quality and analytic rigor to anything to be found offline in more conventional media addressing the same topics.

That said, blogs are never going to supplant The New York Times or CNN, as this handy little graphic makes clear:

It's also overly simplistic to conclude, as the hypothesis of "The Long Tail" would have it, that you're either on the A-List, read by millions, or you're nowhere.   Going just a very short distance further down the popularity distribution curve shows blogs gaining a lot of real estate on the MSM:

Sifry calls sites that are neither on the A-list nor irrelevant The Magic Middle of the attention curve:

"This realm of publishing highlights some of the most interesting and influential bloggers and publishers that are often writing about topics that are topical or niche, like Chocolate and Zucchini on food, Wi-fi Net News on Wireless networking, TechCrunch on Internet Companies, Blogging Baby on parenting, Yarn Harlot on knitting, or Stereogum on music - these are blogs that are interesting, topical, and influential, and in some cases are radically changing the economics of trade publishing. [...] 

"And what is so interesting to me is how interesting, exciting, informative, and witty these blogs often are. "

So it's official:  You are a subscriber in good standing to "The Magic Middle."  And "Adam Smith, Esq." is a publication in every sense intended by that moniker.