As reported Tuesday afternoon by Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times, The Washington Post has announced a major shift in how it sources and shares opinion content.
Through a new initiative called Ripple, the paper will begin aggregating and promoting columns not just from its own contributors, but from journalists at other U.S. newspapers, Substack writers, and, eventually, nonprofessional authors guided by an AI writing coach.
This content will be on The Post’s website and app but outside its paywall—presumably to garner greater readership on the original publisher’s site. The Post will now be curating more authoritative voices from more places on more subjects to broaden, coverage and perspective.
Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, has encouraged its leadership to embrace aggregation—specifically, the practice of summarizing and linking to journalism from other outlets. While Ripple focuses on a different kind of aggregation and curation, the underlying strategy is the same: broadening reach by curating and amplifying outside voices.
Why am I sharing this news?
Because it reflects a growing truth: Publishing is no longer confined to the voice of the edited professional, to large mainstream publishers or traditional newsrooms.
Today, credibility and insight come from many directions and from many sources. The challenge—and opportunity—is to bring those individual publishers—the citizen publisher, if you all, together in ways that serve readers and elevates and preserves the best of what’s being published.
That’s exactly the role we see the LexBlog Network and Community playing in legal publishing.
The legal profession is home to tens of thousands of knowledgeable voices—lawyers, legal scholars, students, librarians, providers to the profession —who are publishing useful, timely, and thoughtful content every day. Over 50,000 legal professionals are publishing on the LexBlog Network, alone. But without thoughtful aggregation and curation of the legal publishing of legal professionals, much of that insight is scattered, overlooked and under appreciated.
Just as The Washington Post is reaching beyond its newsroom and aggregating the publishing of “citizen publishers,” at LexBlog we believe the legal profession must treat its best independent publishing by legal professionals with equal seriousness.
That means bringing it together—whether a blog post, article, alert or whatever one may label their publishing, and organize it, give it context, and make it accessible—to fellow legal professionals, to clients and prospective clients, legal research and AI platforms, and the public at large.