Who's On First?

Anthony Paonita

Corporate Counsel

03-01-2013

It used to be so easy. Editors here would talk to our reporters about stories to cover. Reporters would write memos for longer articles, and the editors would assign the story. For the magazine, that is. It really was the only place that an article could go. We had 12 chances a year to fill up about 50–60 pages with news, features, commentary, graphics, and art, and that would be it. Okay, when this thing called the Internet came around, we'd put up a couple of print stories on the site, along with a prominent "subscribe" button, just to have a presence out there in cyberspace.

But like a lot of things, it's not quite so simple anymore. A few years ago, Corporate Counsel , like our sibling publications (or what the Brits so felicitously call "sister titles"), started up a daily news operation. With much of the same or slightly augmented staff, along with a dedicated editor, we put out daily articles, along with some expert advice by lawyers and technologists in the field. You can see their efforts every day at ?CorpCounsel.com.

Then even this seemingly tidy arrangement got a little complicated. Do the two operations ever meet? Who works on what on any given day? Is senior reporter Sue Reisinger reporting an in-depth feature article for the magazine while following breaking news for the site? Yes—at least that's the answer most of the time. And also, most of the time, what Sue or her colleagues write for the magazine appears in print first. But they do a lot online, too, which may or may not lead to longer, more feature-like treatment in the magazine.

By now, I hope you're getting the sense of what we editors here deal with every day, trying to decide where certain information goes, and when it gets put out there.

All of this is a long windup to something that does not appear in these pages at all, at least not yet. We'll be presenting highlights from "Corporate Counsel: Agenda 2013" online first—which is a first for us. You should be able to find it on our website right about now.

The study, done in concert with our colleagues at ALM Legal Intelligence (a part of the company that owns this magazine), is a look at what's on your minds right now in terms of managing your department and outside counsel, managing risk, and how you view your and your department's role in your company or institution. Anecdotally, for example, we know that risk and compliance are big on your agenda. I always ask any general counsel I can, "What keeps you up at night?" I invariably get a variation on "what the sales force is up to in Country X." Now we know how prevalent that sentiment is.

We ran this first in print last year, the first time we conducted the survey. But we now have a crack squad of people doing online interactive graphics, led by Jonathan Hayter. Jennifer Tonti of ALM Legal Intelligence coordinated the survey itself, reporter Catherine Dunn wrote about it, and CC Web editor Brian Glaser put it all together on our site.