At THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Law Blog, the lead writer departed. Last Friday, Dan Slater announced his leaving. As some of us recall, his predecessor Peter Lattman also made a similar announcement over a year ago. They're not alone. In Legal Blog Watch, Robert J. Ambrogi delivers a eulogy of sorts for three other legal bloggers who "threw in the virtual towel."
Obviously, it isn't the subject matter. Just about every digital site, ranging from Gawker.com to Politico.com, has experienced unusual turnover. It's the metabolism. It's post-print. And many print writers can't or won't adjust. In THE NEW REPUBLIC, Gabriel Sherman describes the pace of an online publication. There, observes Sherman, "speed rules" on a sustained basis. One of the head honchos at Politico.com John Harris reminded the digital staff that they "can't organize our thinking around the institutional rhythms of a newspaper. It's not okay to sprint for three days and then coast."
The environment which Sherman has captured in her article mirrors that of entrepreneurship. The metabolism is hypomanic. And it was exactly the speedy thought processes and fast execution, argues psychologist John D. Gartner in his 2005 "The Hypomanic Edge: The link between a little craziness and a lot of success in America", which made the U.S. economic top dog. According to Gartner a bunch of hypomanics, who couldn't fit into society in the old country, were the ones who came to settle the new. The rest was history.
Being an entrepreneur is not for every writer, or perhaps not for most writers. The medium of the net requires a strong mixture of hypomania, obsessive compulsive disorder, and competitiveness. Those are not the traditional qualities of writers. And that's exactly why it took the emergence of the web for scribes, ranging from Ana Marie Cox to me, to finally succeed. In print, just like our hypomanic ancestors growing up in Europe and England, we were, well, not ideal fits. Much of the print world was and is elite, Waspy, overly polished in its prose. Fast-metabolism folks like us rarely made it far up those kinds of food chains. More accurately, we were often expelled from Paradise.
The digital type of success is not for the many, including the lion's share of defense lawyers. Among those in the plaintiff bar, such as Bill Marler of Marler Clark, well it's been quite another story. Could that partly account for the plaintiff's bar unique success in America?
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