Since we’re approaching the third week of publications, I want to provide a note on why I am designing, publishing and operating this site the way I am.

To explain why I’m designing this site a certain way, it stands to reason that I must explain how I am designing the site.

Inland Empire Law Weekly publishes one edition every Sunday. That one edition is contained in one edition guide I email to you. An identical guide is published on the website. That edition guide links out to all the articles I publish that Sunday. At the bottom of the guide, I link out to legal news from other publications, because I am one man, and cannot cover all of the Inland Empire’s legal news myself. 

I include photographs of litigants and lawyers in my articles when I can. If I do not have access to photographs relevant to the story, I do not add a filler image to the post. The site is paywalled, but the edition guide is not. Paywalls are removed after the article is two weeks old. I accept one advertisement a week. The price of that advertisement is indexed to the number of subscribers. I syndicate news from CalMatters, and I plan to syndicate more news from other publications. 

I have reserved social media handles for this publication, and will start promoting content on them soon. 

Posting articles without photographs, having a strict paywall for recent news, and publishing a weekly edition instead of constant publication: all of these designs are anathema to most American news publishers. 

That is because most American news publishers based their design strategy to optimize for third-party algorithms. Facebook and Twitter promote articles with feature photos more than they promote articles without them. They promote “active” accounts that post daily rather than accounts that post once a week. Social media sites also depress articles from paywalled publications—users who find a paywall at the end of a link click back almost immediately, and the algorithms often view that as meaning the link is not worth clicking.

Attempting to build social-media-first editions, the majority of American publications took on the Buzzfeed model: clickbait, lists and quizzes, with no paywall. In other words, low-quality content to maximize support from social media algorithms and search engines.

These attempts to work for other organizations’ algorithms have backfired. Beyond the growing distrust of news these strategies caused, Facebook and Twitter have slowly moved away from working in good faith with news publishers. Facebook inflated the view count for videos, triggering a pivot to video that resulted in many publishers firing text reporters and hiring video reporters. More recently, the company has announced that their algorithm is written to intentionally demote the reach of news organizations. Google is taking similar steps by feeding information from news sites into their AI search assistant, and feeding users the news as their AI’s knowledge, without attribution to the original reporting.

These actions, and more, have caused some backlash among publishers, with some industry leaders discussing the importance of owning the means of distribution. This movement’s most ardent supporters are the Substackers, who publish paywalled articles directly to email. Email reach is not dependent on the whims of a secret algorithm. If you get their email, it’s because you signed up for it, and I imagine you signed up for it because you want to read it. 

Adopting Substack’s direct-to-email distribution format allows me to radically rethink how I should package my content, especially since I publish once a week.

If I publish an edition guide directly to your email, do you want me to include a photograph with every single article, some of them of the courthouse? Or should I just publish the photographs that are actually interesting, in the case that I have access to them? (Only publishing photographs which I readily have also frees up time that would otherwise be spent scrambling for a photo.)

To make sure the absence of photos does not ruin the website experience, I found a website design that deprioritizes photographs. If you look at the top of my home page, you’ll see that the articles without a photo look just fine. The bottom of the page used to have blank rectangles, filler for absent photographs. I was able to remove those rectangles this week.

So, why did I choose to publish once a week instead of whenever I can? Isn’t the need for speed a defining characterization of journalism? I was inspired by the publications Wochenzeitung and Republik, two Swiss publications I visited in 2019. Wochenzeitung started as a print weekly paper in 1981, while Republik, a “digital-magazine” was started in 2018. Both publish weekly, and both have continued to be economically successful at a time when most publications are shrinking. The staff members I talked to said that a weekly edition is just a better experience than publishing all the time. Personally speaking, I agree. I would rather receive a single package of news a week than check a website every day. There’s a lot to say about the psychological nature of packaged content and the importance of regular news habits, but I don’t have the time for that now. For the majority of people, especially busy lawyers, that ideal time would be on Sunday morning. 

Finally, we come to the site design that kicks in for the first time today: the paywall being removed on articles that are two weeks old. I copied this, again, from Wochenzeitung. Online publications face the difficult task of reconciling the marketing and educational import of widely distributing news with the financial method of supporting that reporting. I think this strikes that balance almost perfectly.

Allowing free access to old news allows more potential subscribers to understand Inland Empire Law Weekly’s value. It also benefits the Inland Empire attorneys I report on: potential litigants can now read about them without a subscription. Other methods of doing this, such as providing a quota of free articles on a regular basis, result in a paywall that is very easy to get around.

I can ramble on for a while longer, but I think that’s enough for now. I am going to continue tweaking this publication as I see ways to benefit it. Please let me know if there are any features you would like to see added.

Thank you,

Aidan McGloin

Editor

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