I read an article recently by a prominent entrepreneur that bemoaned the negativity of the business media.
Far from feeling defensive, the piece struck a chord, coming at a time when there has been some laughably melodramatic reporting of the current economic climate (the Great Depression this is not). Certainly, there is some truth to claims that the media can get overly focused on things going wrong. It is also a criticism often levelled at the legal press and is not entirely without merit.
Still, there are a couple of caveats to state when assessing whether the legal press is too negative. Firstly, any publication worth its salt is going to be interested in what makes its subject tick, and things going wrong usually tell you a lot about how an organisation ticks. As such, it is our business to write about the reverses that law firms face and how they deal with them.
Likewise, anyone can write a commentary or analysis that ducks the sensitive issues. It’s often our job to make criticisms and draw unflattering conclusions based on the facts as we see them, though obviously such criticisms should be balanced and well-argued. Over-hyped calamity is as useless to comprehension as over-sold victory. We should also be open to debate critical comments t o assess if we have missed relevant facts or simply called it wrong.
However, the longer that I cover business, the more I find myself interested in when things go right and, crucially, why they went right. A US colleague recently described this balancing act more eloquently when he was questioned about the US legal press’s supposed negativity. He observed: “We make a conscious effort to cover both sides of the situation. We write about virtuoso performances and virtuoso disasters.”
Putting that in a domestic context, I sometimes think of Legal Week in terms of that old slogan for the Yellow Pages: “We’re not just there for the nasty things in life.”
But here’s the thing about success: while failure tends to be quick, disruptive and easy to spot, success is often a complex, well-disguised creature. Identifying success requires a healthy dialogue between us and our subjects, particularly given law firms’ propensity to articulate their activities in the language of unalloyed corporate guff.
Despite Legal Week being increasingly explicit about its desire to bring a more rigorous and less sensationalist style to the industry it covers, I’m not sure that our basic interest in the success stories has been understood. But if you’re not telling us about those victories beyond issuing jargon-heavy press releases, inevitably we will find out about them less often.
