Merrick Garland Project

From Edgecliffe-Johnson:

By this past year, that figure had plunged to 32 percent...

Since Craigslist and Walmart hollowed out neighborhood small business models, America's staying journalism jobs become focused in cosmopolitan, economically liberal and successful coastal towns. If you only meet a reporter if they parachute in from Washington or New York to pay an election, natural catastrophe...,"which changes the relationship a community has to journalism" Ford says.

Neighborhood news in Bowling Green means Joe Imel, the director of media operations in the Bowling Green Daily News. Imel conducts the presses of this 163-year-old newspaper"with a police scanner hand along with a pillar-of-the-community appetite for school board meetings and small league results."

"You men cover the flash and trash. We're the ones sitting covering the day in and day out things," Imel tells Edgecliffe-Johnson. "If we were to move away, you would never know they'd raised your taxes"

James Neal, the owner of a little Bowling Green grocery and filling station, hits the nail on the head on where lots of Americans turn for news. He told Edgecliffe-Johnson that he"prefers to receive his news from his patrons than compared to journalists..."

The Internet democratized news publishing. Whether it's a website, website, or social network, we started to our get information from one another. News actually became what somebody told us.

The validity and value we put within this news is determined by how much we trust the messenger, the writer. Common sense dictates that many Americans would anticipate"locals" over others.

Websites have democratized reporting and commentary for local lawyers. Lawyers have the capacity to share helpful and practical legal advice on general or market subjects for the folks in their town or municipality. The algorithms running Google and other social networks see that locals see the neighborhood lawyer's blog commentary.

Unfortunately, attorneys have not seized this opportunity to discuss legal advice with locals. Websites, often full of canned content written by others thousands of miles away, do not engage locals. People don't trust them.

The void is filled by large businesses. Whether Avvo, Legal Zoom, Rocket Lawyer, the ABA, or state bar associations, the folks penning this online legal advice and comment have never lived in the cities they are wanting to reach.

This legal information and comment, though somewhat relevant, has no local flair or anecdotes. No"reporter" who's walked the roads of the town, talked with locals in coffee shops and pubs, coached youth sports, or managed matters before local candidates.

Legislation blog posts from a local attorney who can associate, who sends her children to the very same schools and has involved in the exact same local political debates, will obviously be more trusted than information from those who"parachute" in through the world wide web to share legal advice for their own gain.

The vast majority of Americans neither trust attorneys nor our justice system. We are right with journalists, with roughly 33 percent of individuals trusting us.

However a survey found the majority of Americans would probably hire a lawyer they see with some form of social media. The reason is trust. We trust those"individuals" we begin publishing online, especially locals.