Back in 2010 I ripped into legal publishing behemoth FindLaw because they had turned to shit-blogging: Producing “content” in the form of writing up local car collisions and then closing with “If you’ve been injured…”

I wrote at the time:

To be clear, dreck-bloggers aren’t interested in creating good content, they simply regurgitate local accident or arrest stories and place a call-to-action link at the bottom.

This pattern has now hit the sports world. On the op-ed pages of the New York Times, former Deputy Editor of Deadpspin, Barry Petchesky, discuses how he was fired because his stories did not deal, in the words of Deadspin’s new owners, with sports. Deadspin had been bought by G/O Media, a private equity firm.

Deadspin believed that sports didn’t end at the locker room, but included a whole host of player and management conduct that occurred off the field. It had an expansive view of sports, just as I have an expansive view of personal injury law that I believe covers ethics, and SCOTUS and marketing and every other aspect of a professional service business.

Petchesky was clear on his view of the scope of a sports editor:

We wanted to show the world the reality of sports, to help readers and players alike understand the labor issues, the politics, the issues of race and class that don’t materially change when the power dynamic is owner/player. In 2014, we obtained audio of then-Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s racist rant against what he considered ungrateful black employees. “Do I make the game, or do they make the game?” Sterling said. Deadspin’s position was that it’s all in the game.

With this purchase, Deadspin follows Sports Illustrated to the grave. Control of SI had been given to “wannabe tech company” TheMaven, which last month fired half of Sports’ Illustrated’s vaunted newsroom, and then went about trying to “hire” local people for peanuts to cover local teams.

In other words, SI is becoming a “content mill,” much the way FindLaw set out to do 10 years ago. Deadspin will presumably follow the same route as it’s website becomes zombified to run local stories that are little more than click-bait, or computer-generated articles.

And this isn’t much different than many financial articles, which are now written by computers instead of people. Every so often I see articles that will give some generic statement about a company’s earnings and I think, “Huh, you can say that about pretty much any story.” Then I Google the sentence and see that it was a line repeated over and over and over again. (See: The Rise of the Robot Reporters)

This use of artificial intelligence to write news stories isn’t limited to margin players of the news business. It’s being used by the Associated Press, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

The obvious problem with all this, of course, is that such pieces – whether written by computer or clueless human — focus only on the who, what, where and when. They really can’t answer why.

This downgrading strips all nuance, color, flavor and human analysis as to the greater ramifications of what an incident means. Context is lost. A robot writer cannot, for instance, understand the significance of ambulance chasers and what that might mean for society at large. It can only report on who was arrested. Or how much a stock changed relative to expectations. Or the scores of a minor league baseball game.

Computers will never see the fire in the eyes of the people involved. No matter how many shit-blogs are churned out in a subject area, th eye will always be devoid of context.

Even lowly bloggers such as myself get pitched on these “services” with “content writers” sending me emails every day asking for my humble little piece of digital real estate so that they can spam the web with their links attached to generic and dreadful “how to” pieces.

I’d rather this space go quiet than publish their pablum.

The “content” writers, whether they are human or computer generated, can’t deal with emotion. They don’t find humor and heartbreak. They can’t sit back and wonder at why things are the way they are.

As Petchesky noted:

Deadspin was the voice of the long-suffering fan, finding the humor and the heartbreak in everything in the world of sports. It was the fan wondering why he was paying $200 to go to a football game to watch a team whose owner would rather pocket profit than pay to improve the roster. It was also the fan troubled by the culture and the politics of sports, the fan who couldn’t help noticing that the larger issues of the real world spilled onto the field. Sticking to sports, pretending that sports can take place in a vacuum, would have been profoundly dishonest.

It’s only getting worse. Im not sure what, if anything, I can actually do about it. But when quality vanishes in favor of quantity, it should be noted, and a small prayer uttered that people will still see and respect quality, and allow it to rise to the top.

Yesterday I started a retrospective on 10 years of law blogging with some of my favorite posts. In this second of two installments I have more, culled from the 1,400+ that I’ve done.

But it’s worth noting a significant change that’s occurred since I started in 2006. While there may be many blogs, there seem to be fewer and fewer that actually interact with each other.

Or at least that’s seems to be true from the consumer end of the law: personal injury, criminal justice, immigration and the like. Many are little more than adjuncts to websites that are stuffed with keywords in the hopes that Google will find them, and then clients will, and they act like islands unto themselves.

The death of the legal blogosphere has long been discussed. Back in the “good old days” bloggers would be linking like crazy to each other and they built upon, or rebutted, the arguments and assertions of others.

Today? Twitter and Facebook seem to have taken a lot of the steam out of the blogosphere, as a short Facebook update or tweet now often takes the place of a blog posting with any depth. It’s fast and it’s easy.

It’s that speed and ease, of course, which also lends itself to less thought and more vacuous comments and conduct.

I’m still at it here, though I do so only when I have the time.  I stand as guilty as others of taking things I might have blogged about, and simply shooting off a tweet that’s then quickly lost to the electronic ethers. As time allows, I hope to reverse that practice in the coming year.

One further note before the postings: I’ve tried hard to shy away from political posts and stick with my core issues. Tort “reform” obviously crosses that boundary.

Of late, however, there have been many Trump posts, as he acts like a one-man bar exam. Everything he does seems to cause legal issues. Some examples that I’ve addressed are: Supreme Court nominations, defamation, sanctions, labor law, and client-attorney privilege. I have no expectation that will change.

Without further ado, a few more of my all-time favorites:

———–

Scalia: “There Is No Right to Secede” — This had nothing to do with personal injury law, of course. But the story of how the late Justice Scalia wrote a letter to my brother, which then went viral 3+ years later, was really, really, really fun. Really.

Does the Tea Party Believe in Conservatism or Tort “Reform”? (8 Questions) — Some people use politics to further an ideological agenda. Some use it so just get whatever the hell they want. This post sits at the intersection of the two.

On Becoming the White House Law Blogger — It’s been over six years since I got that April 1st appointment and the New York Times ran with it based on “blogospheric chatter.” Having that much fun shouldn’t be legal.

Outsourcing Marketing = Outsourcing Ethics (5 Problems With Outsourcing Attorney Marketing) — Legal marketing is inextricably intertwined with legal ethics, so if you outsource your marketing you have outsourced your ethics and reputation. Lesson: Don’t outsource you ethics and reputation.

Study Says Texas Medical Malpractice Tort “Reform” Is A Bust (Is Congress Listening?) — There are 86 posts here that are tagged with Tort “Reform.” This is one of them. Because I’m a sucker for using data and analytics instead of anecdotes to prove a point.

Are FindLaw’s “Blogs” Tainting Its Clients, Commentators and the Profession of Law? — FindLaw printed crap, using the same name of my blog. And I called them out on it. Big time.

Barney Speaks Out (An Interview with the First Pooch) — After George Bush’s pooch bit a reporter, I did a a little legal analysis and then decided, what the hell, why not interview the dog? But of all the things that have happened to me as a result of this blog, being quoted on the editorial page of The Economic Times of India about the initial bite has to be the most unexpected. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, you can make parts of it up.

Joseph Rakofsky – I Have An Answer for You — From the first time I was sued (along with many other law bloggers), wherein I told the plaintiff to “Go shit in a hat and pull it down over your ears.”  It’s a type of legalese.

Judge Rips Doc for “Huge Lie”; Perjury Prosecution Possible; Victims May Number in Thousands — When a judge ripped Dr. Michael Katz for what the judge called a “huge lie,” it led to this post and then a 7-part series on defense medical exams along with my call for a state investigation into insurance fraud perpetuated by the insurance industry itself.

Shooting the Messenger (I’ve Been Sued Again) — Reporting that prior story of the judge repeatedly calling Dr. Michael Katz a liar got me sued, for the second time. But you know what? Reporting on what a judge says is fair game. And yes, the suit was quickly chucked out by the court. Same as the first one. Lesson: Don’t bring a stupid suit against me — I will humiliate you.

About That Aunt Suing An 8-year-old —  A story that went viral for no good reason other than a reporter wanting to write a skewed article about it for page views.

Death by Red Bull, An $85M Lawsuit, And The Money Shot – One of my pet peeves is lawyers that do stupid things for publicity that have the effect of poisoning the jury pool.  The comments, by the way, are priceless.

New York Needs More Robust Anti-SLAPP Legislation — My op-ed in the New York Law Journal regarding frivolous defamation suits, and threats to bring them, that have the effect of stifling free speech.

That’s it for now, unless I come back with Part 3 of this two-part series.  Stranger things have certainly happened.

♫Summertime, and the living is easy.♬

So goes the song. It’s a time to relax at a beach, hike in the mountains, take in a few ballgames, or just kick back generally with family and friends. The practice of law slows down a bit, as lawyers, judges, witnesses taking vacations makes the scheduling of depositions and trials a “problem.”

And it’s the time of year for news organizations to hunt down “summer stories,” that are usually light, and frivolous, or are strictly local but the national news picks them up and runs with them. A story like Pokemon Go taking off like a bat out of hell, for instance, is classic summer fodder. To be followed by people getting hurt or killed due to aggravated acts of stupidity as they turn a blind eye to their surroundings and chase digital fantasies.

But not this summer.

Yesterday, a bloody coup attempt in NATO ally Turkey.

Just one day after a horrific terror attack in Nice, France.

Which had followed in short order the killing of five Dallas cops (on top of many shootings of black men by white cops).

Which had followed in short order the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

This is all interspersed with the continuing horrors of a civil war in Syria, bombings in Iraq and elsewhere that our news organizations pay scant attention to in relation to the significance of the damage done.

And, of course, a presidential campaign with one candidate seeming to do do all that he can to be racially divisive.

It makes it tough to write about personal injury law. I’ve wanted to, for sure, but each time I sit down at the keyboard I get sidetracked by the latest misery and lose my inspiration.

In my mind, for instance, I had a piece written in my head about the Tesla car on auto pilot that slammed into a left turning truck. Everyone wrote about the car, with few mentioning that the truck was making a left without the coast being clear.

The summer of ’16 is not shaping up well, my friends. Whether or not this goes down in history as a momentous time or not isn’t something I’m smart enough to say, but at the moment it sure doesn’t look good. No one will ever brand this the Summer of Love.

I could issue a little prayer that things get better, but such hopefulness will, in all likelihood, simply leave me disappointed. Another option is to simply disconnect from the digital world, under the ignorance is bliss philosophy, but that will not achieve anything either.

So if the blog is quiet for awhile, you’ll know why. It’s because I’m watching the news.