Is Blogging Worth It? (Jr. Law Prawfs FAQ)

The Junior Law Prawfs FAQ series enters its third week. The first week focused on publishing legal scholarship (responses, book reviews, and online law review essays). The second week turned to interacting with peers in one's field, including promoting new scholarship, commenting on others' draft scholarship, and increasing in-person scholarly interactions. This week's line of questions builds on last week's, but concerns interacting within one's field more generally (not just limited to other scholars in the field).

Today's FAQ asks a very common question: Especially as a junior scholar, is blogging worth it?

To focus our crowdsourcing, let's put a couple things to one side. First, follow the cardinal Ask Your Colleagues rule, especially pretenure as your tenure-voting colleagues will no doubt have strong feelings on whether they feel blogging is a worthwhile pretenure endeavor. Second, make sure your tenure house is in order. I see blogging as one means to help one become a national (or international) voice in one's field, but it's not a substitute for the traditional scholarship required for promotion and tenure (at least not at any school I know). So this FAQ assumes the junior scholar can blog on top of doing the things required for tenure.

With those assumptions in mind, the next set of questions concern what type of blogging and what benefits one hopes to secure. Let's start with the type of blogging, as I think that changes the cost-benefit analysis. Here I'm going to define blogging more broadly than perhaps the ordinary, everyday meaning:

(1) Generalist Law Nerd Blogging: Perhaps we should call this category the first wave of legal blogging? In this category I include any of the generalist law blogs (Prawfs, Concurring Opinions, Faculty Lounge, Volokh Conspiracy, etc.), where a collection of legal scholars blog about nerdy law and policy topics that may interest them. To be sure, some blog more exclusively on their subject matters, but the blogs themselves seem more general, with the target audience being other legal scholars and law nerds.

(2) Field-Specific, Law Professor Blogging: Here think Law Professor Blogs Network. These blogs have a subject-matter focus, yet the bloggers are generally still legal scholars. The audience, though, may be more than just other legal scholars and may include policymakers, advocates, and others interested in the field. Some of these blogs are team efforts, whereas others -- Doug Berman, Paul Caron, and Rick Hasen come immediately to mind -- are mainly solo endeavors. Some of these blogs attempt to cover everything that's happening in that field (again, see, for example, Berman, Caron, and Hasen), whereas others cover topics that are of most interest to the bloggers (and their audience).

(3) Field-Specific, Yet Practitioner-Oriented Blogging: A variant of the prior category, these blogs are similarly focused on one legal field, but their audience is perhaps as much if not more policymakers and practitioners, as it is other legal scholars and law nerds. This is at least the goal of the Notice and Comment blog, where I've regularly blogged since Fall 2014. The Yale Journal on Regulation student editors founded the blog, and we became the official administrative law blog in the Law Professor Blogs Network about a year later. More recently, the ABA Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice joined as a co-partner to expand our government and practitioner audiences (and bloggers). The blog's mission is definitely to reach policymaking, government, and practitioner audiences.

(4) Beyond Blogging: As traditional media outlets have been forced to evolve (perhaps in part in response to blogging), opportunities to write regularly for more traditional media outlets seem to be on the rise. Volokh Conspiracy's migration to the Washington Post is one example of that trend. But individual law professors have also been deeply involved, with Garret Epps, Noah Feldman, Peter Shane, Steven Davidoff Solomon, and Cass Sustein coming immediately to mind. These authors write regularly for the Atlantic, Bloomberg View, Huffington Post, and the New York Times, among others, as opposed to at law blogs. 

My guess is that the costs and benefits will vary significantly depending on the type of blogging one is interested in doing, and of course what one hopes to get out of it.  I can only speak from my own personal experience. As I mentioned above, I started blogging at the Yale Journal on Regulation back in Fall 2014. The advice I received from many regular (and retired) bloggers was to start with a narrow focus, as blogging takes up a lot of time and can end up swallowing time otherwise dedicated for my own research.

Inspired by Jotwell, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette's Written Description Blog, and Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog, I decided my initial experiment would be the AdLaw Bridge Series, in which I would highlight one piece of administrative law scholarship each week in an attempt to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of administrative law. I was already reading all of these articles, and oftentimes providing comments to the authors, so I thought the additional work of coming up with a few hundred words about the piece wouldn't be too overwhelming. 

As I got more comfortable with doing the AdLaw Bridge Series, I'd sprinkle in a couple substantive posts of my own each month, covering current administrative law cases and topics. For instance, I did two fun posts on King v. Burwell (within hours of the opinion being issued), and more recently one in response to Tyler Cowen on Trump as Regulator-in-Chief. We've also done a number of online symposia on various topics, and I do a monthly SSRN adlaw scholarship top-10 list. I of course also blog about my own scholarship -- at the idea-generating stage, at the comment-soliciting stage, and at publication.

I definitely underestimated the costs of blogging regularly, but fortunately I also undervalued the benefits. Blogging regularly is therapeutic, as it keeps me more engaged with ideas and arguments in my field, supporting my own research and teaching. Blogging about articles makes me read them a bit more closely, and obviously has helped me get to know scholars in my field. Hopefully readers have also found them useful. If one enjoys talking with reporters or consulting with policymakers, the number of calls I receive from both groups has gone up considerably since I started blogging, and many of those individuals reference blog posts of mine. SSRN downloads shot through the roof once I started blogging, and I hope that means that scholars, government officials, and practitioners are reading and thinking about my scholarship.

In sum, my own experience is that there are significant costs and benefits to blogging, but at least for me it has had a large positive net value and complements well my research agenda. It's particularly helpful for someone like me who hopes that federal agency officials and administrative law practitioners will read and incorporate my scholarship.

I'm curious to hear others' perspectives on blogging regularly -- both as to the cost-benefit analysis generally and as to cost-effective ways to blog. If you've already blogged about that elsewhere, please do include the link(s) in the comments so that others can find them here.

 

@chris_j_walker