Happy Birthday to Us! The PSLawNet Blog Turns One! (Where Are Your Presents?)
One year and 350 posts later, we’re positively thrilled that the PSLawNet Blog has transitioned from an uncertain experiment to a going concern! The Blog was viewed almost 50,000 times last year, and more importantly our readership grew consistently from the beginning of 2010 to the end. We’ll use this birthday post to do two things: 1) thank our
contributors and colleagues, and 2) lay out our goals for the blog in 2011.
First, we must thank the extraordinarily talented and accomplished guest bloggers who have contributed to our “Expert Opinion” series. Our guests have included some true luminaries in the public interest arena (e.g. Orleans Parish Public Defender Derwyn Bunton), up-and-coming public interest stars (Todd Belcore, now an Equal Justice Works Fellow in Chicago), as well as law school administrators (like Georgetown Law’s public service dean Barbara Moulton and Temple Law School’s dean JoAnne Epps) who have public interest backgrounds and now promote those careers for students. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to former PSLawNet Fellow Katie Dilks, the founding co-editor of the Blog, and to all of the other public interest bloggers (see our Blogroll at right) who work diligently to keep our community informed and connected.
Second, we want to highlight some of the content you’ll be seeing in 2011. The PSLawNet Blog covers two separate but overlapping content areas: general news coming from the public interest community, as well as resources for finding and landing public interest jobs. To those ends, here’s what will appear regularly on the Blog:
- The PSLawNet Jobs Report will run every Monday. The Report – like this one posted yesterday – will offer updates on the number of new listings posted on PSLawNet, feature one or two really attractive listings among the new ones, and highlight one of the dozens of career resources which are freely available on PSLawNet.
- The PSLawNet Public Interest News Bulletin will run every Friday. The Bulletin – like this one posted last week – summarizes public interest news stories from legal and non-legal media throughout the country. (Why is keeping up with this news important for law students and recent grads? It will help you immensely when networking and interviewing for jobs. A job candidate who’s aware of recent developments in a certain field and who has a contextual knowledge of how that field works and who the primary actors are will be memorable to interviewers.)
- Our Expert Opinion series isn’t missing a beat. Look out for a blog post on job-search strategic planning this week, and a post on networking tips next week.
- In addition to these three running features, we’re going to ramp up our posting of news stories, event announcements, and job resources during the week so that the blog has even more consistent, robust content offerings.
Thanks for reading, and please let us know if there’s anything you’d like to see on the PSLawNet Blog. Happy 2011!
– Steve Grumm and Meredith Flowe
