Well-known TechCrunch columnist and Silicon Valley journalist Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) debuts today her new tech news site called PandoDaily.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher (@karaswisher), Lacy has the backing of $2 million in venture capital and will feature three of TechCrunch?s most high-profile former bloggers: Michael Arrington, M.G. Siegler and Paul Carr.
Lacy's debut makes me wonder if we're ready for a startup legal news site. Not one that would be an offshoot of the large legal publishers (Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, ALM -Law.com, Wolters Kluwer) and not a small time effort started on a shoe string. But a legal news site that would compete with ALM's legal periodicals that would be driven by innovative people willing to work their ass off to get it off the ground.
Michael Arrington was a Stanford Law grad and corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini from 1997 to 1999, before getting into Internet startups. In 2005, Arrington started TechCrunch to cover internet startups and related news. When I asked him a few years later how he got TechCrunch to such prominence, he said blogging 16 hours a day for a year.
As TechCrunch grew, Arrington added writers and senior leadership in the form of CEO, Heather Harde, former vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Fox Interactive Media. In 2010 AOL bought TechCrunch for north of $25 million.
Unfortunately TechCrunch is a shadow of itself now that Arrington, Harde, and others have left. That's not to say AOL is not making money from the acquisition in ad revenue and growing out its ancillary blog and news site network.
Is a 'TechCrunch in the law' viable? I don't know. We have Above the Law (ATL) which has been labeled a aw gossip blog which circulates rumors primarily about big law. ATL appears to be financially viable and could be an attractive buy for a larger publisher.
My gut tells me a niche focused legal news & commentary site driven by people who know what they are doing with web publishing - from the writing and corporate leadership standpoint is viable. I also believe it would be something of value to larger legal publishers for a later acquisition.
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