Even if it’s Deep in the Blogosphere,Your LexisNexis Search Can Find It
By Matt Wagner
With the LexisNexis services, you can search multiple information outlets and mediums simultaneously. Search magazines, newspapers, journals and broadcast transcripts together—in just a few keystrokes. And with the advent of the World Wide Web in the last decade, you can now include blogs among the media categories you search at lexis.com.
Before 2004 blogs weren’t even a part of our Information Professional vocabulary. For anyone unfamiliar with blogs, they are a type of electronic message board for offering an additional level of media awareness—opinions from industry experts and open opinions from peers or others outside a particular industry or organization. Blogs also offer an online forum for peer-to-peer information sharing and/or networking. In fact, law librarians are among the numerous blog publishers out there today.
Blogs are also often the first to break major news stories and to provide an important barometer of public perception. If you are skeptical about this assessment, you need only look to the 2008 election coverage. Bloggers were part of the news cycle during last year’s political campaigns.
Since June 2006, LexisNexis has partnered with Newstex® to bring you an unparallel collection of blogs. Now you can search more than 2,600 blogs via lexis.com. You can even deliver blog content through LexisNexis® Publisher.
Newstex Blogs on Demand® delivers value-added, full-text blog content. Newstex processes blogs in real time through its NewsRouter™ technology and automatically tags each blog post with key data, such as company names, stock tickers, key executives and government officials and detailed topical categories. Each blog post delivered as part of Newstex Blogs on Demand also includes Newstex’s proprietary PeopleTickering™—a system that synthesizes metadata from numerous premium sources and quality blogs to create a database of people who make the news.
While blogs can be searched via general search engines or a blog search engine, only LexisNexis integrates blog content with mainstream news content so that researchers have the ability to review information on a topic regardless of content media. Since “the blogosphere” does not really have formal standards and is now quite robust, the Newstex editorial review process ensures that you are searching the best blog content for each topic or industry/market.
Some of the criteria used to evaluate the blogs include:
- Category/Topic (Business, Entertainment, Marketing, Media, Politics and Technology strongly dominate the Newstex roster.)
- Frequency (Newstex prefers to bring in blogs that generate a minimum of one post per day but is willing to accept blogs with two updated posts per week and makes exceptions with a well-known or a client-requested blog.)
- Content Style (News/Commentary or Commentary)
- Tone (Professional/Journalistic, Narrative, Edgy)
- Perspective (Insider or Watcher)
- Political Bent (Left, Right or Center)
The quality and consistency of blogs continue to be evaluated by the Newstex editorial team even after they’ve been added to their database.
So why is blog content important to the business and practice of law? In a nutshell, as the legal industry grows increasingly competitive, it is essential that your decision makers have at their disposal any and all information that will enable them to make informed business decisions and to maintain and/or gain a strategic advantage over the competition. By including blog content, your organization and attorneys can:
- Monitor news about your firm, clients and key competitors.
- Track trends within an industry or practice area.
- Discover new opportunities and check for conflicts between potential and existing clients.
- Evaluate alliances with other firms.
- Research companies/opposing parties involved in litigation.
- Evaluate businesses and owners when researching M&A-related activities.
LexisNexis offers you the flexibility of searching Newstex blog content in both large group files such as News, All or narrow databases that contain only blogs in a particular subject area, such as Newstex Legal Blogs.
Newstex content is updated same-day at lexis.com, and a three-year archive is available for most blogs. If you are a LexisNexis Publisher subscriber, we can provide your firm full-text delivery of subject-specific Newstex blogs. And, if for some reason you want to exclude blog content from your search results through lexis.com or Publisher, we offer you an easy solution: simply add AND NOT PUBLICATION (blogs) to your search and eliminate these documents.
Learn more about how you can harness the value of blog content for your organization. If you have questions regarding Newstex content and research, please contact your LexisNexis Librarian Relations Consultant.
