A giant hat tip to our colleague, Yankee, for pointing out the Bob Ambrogi piece on Editor and Publisher Molly McDonough's resignation from ABA Journal. Combined with what has been a steady decline in quality and reader interaction, Ms. McDonough's resignation and comments are the functional equivalent of a ship's captain opening all the sea valves, then jumping over the rail while shouting urgent warnings about torpedoes and an iceberg.
As Ambrogi's piece recognizes (and as I have mentioned in prior posts), Molly McDonough was instrumental in getting ABAJournal.com under sail as a reputable website. When she served as Assistant Managing Editor and personally moderated site comments, things went very well indeed. It was a golden age for the website, because (with the exception of banning Ellen Barshevsky) most of Molly's decisions reflected sound and mature judgment, she would explain them, and she tried to be consistent so the vague site rules were at least applied even-handedly.
Unfortunately (as I have also mentioned before), when Molly moved up to Managing Editor, then ultimately, Editor and Publisher, ABA provided no resources to secure any competent replacement. Busy with her new duties, Ms. McDonough had little choice but to leave the steering and the sail to subordinates such as Sarah Mui and Lee Rawles.
Unlike their predecessor, Mui and Rawles tended to be arbitrary and abrasive, and didn't explain their decisions, which also tended to reflect a certain absence of professionalism, objectivity, maturity and judgment. Many readers simply could not stand their unprincipled, biased and obnoxious mismanagement of the comment boards and other interactive site features. This mismanagement extended to banning those commenters who criticized their unprincipled, biased and arbitrary conduct, and I doubt anyone will ever know how many members or how many thousands of dollars in dues and advertising revenue Mui and Rawles managed to cost ABA.
What we do know is that interactive features such as the Blawg 100 soon began to shrivel on the vine. By December of 2016, it was clear that reader participation had substantually evaporated, and the Blawg 100 was in serious trouble.
In April 2018, the same thing had happened to the Journal's Peeps Contest (founded initially by Molly McDonough when she was running the website directly). Mui and Rawles had knocked reader participation down to the point that the contest was failing, and the Journal killed it.
By July of 2018, the Blawg 100 was likewise in such serious trouble that the Journal expanded it to the "Web 100" to try to draw additional reader participation. However, this failed to overcome the ill effects of the incompetents left managing the website, and the "Web 100" quietly faded away after December 2018.
Meanwhile, on the ABA Journal's comment boards, the biased and unprincipled failure to fairly or consistently moderate comments had reduced the quality of discourse to that of an open sewer. Rawles was leaving up obscenities, personal attacks, and (as of January 2019) even death threats, as long as they were posted by leftist commenters. Many readers complained, and I personally sent ABA President Bob Carlson a polite communication noting that his stumping on "civility" was somewhat at odds with the standards being followed in his own shop. By late April of this year, the ABA Board of Editors recognized that the comment boards had reached a state such that they simply needed to be shut down.
Soon after, in May 2019, the "Cartoon Caption Contest" quietly and without fanfare ceased to be. In short, nearly every single interactive reader feature of the Journal had been destroyed (I note here the possible exception of "Question of the Week," although responses all have to be submitted offsite, via social media mechanisms such as Facebook or Twitter).
In the Treasurer's Report at the 2019 Annual Meeting, the ABA Treasurer disclosed that advertising revenues had failed to come in as forecast. This is most likely reflective of a substantial decline in readership and web traffic. Even though the Journal publicly claims to be read each month by "half the nation's lawyers," advertisers typically use web traffic analytics services to determine what is really true, and the decline in advertising revenues speaks volumes.
So, too, do Molly McDonough's statements as reported by Bob Ambrogi. Recognizing that there is undoubtedly a great deal Molly is not telling us, what she is telling us is quite enough to get a sense of how bad things have become. The Blawg index is going to be taken down, and ABA Journal.com is going to be forcibly migrated to a platform that is still substantially defective, and Molly McDonough doesn't believe it will be a workable platform for editorial publishing. In short (and although she avoids criticizing her useless subordinates out of kindness), she sees that what her talentless underlings have not already destroyed, ABA is about to finish off. In essence, Rawles and Mui have fired the ship to the waterline, and now ABA is sending in a final spread of torpedoes to clear the wreck from the sea lanes.
I suspect a final shoe to fall as Debra Cassens Weiss has to make her decision on whether to stay aboard this wreck while it goes awash. Ms. Weiss actually holds a J.D., and is (in my opinion) far more qualified as a journalist than those to whom charge of the website was given when Molly moved up the ladder. Also (as I have mentioned in prior posts) better than 80% of all visible work on the website is generated by Ms. Weiss personally, so she has basically been, for some time, running the pumps for the idiots asleep on the bridge. Notably, she has been with the Journal since 1986, and so, seems almost certain to be covered by and vested in the old defined benefit pension plan. Moreover, as a writer with actual demonstrated competence in covering legal news, it seems likely she could land any number of better jobs. I would not venture one nickel on her staying many more days at ABA Journal. When the captain goes over the rail, nobody very smart is going to continue waiting for the official call to "abandon ship."
Stick a fork in it. ABAJournal.com is done.
https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2019/09/amid-budget-cuts-and-tech-changes-aba-journal-head-resigns.html
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