US News to End Hard-Copy Subscriptions But Keep Law School Rankings, Website & Newsstand Sales
Updated: A venerable news magazine best-known to many for its controversial law school rankings is ending hard-copy subscriptions as of next month.
However, U.S. News & World Report will continue publishing the annual law school rankings, says Robert Morse, the magazine’s director of data research.
“This change has no impact on the law rankings,” he tells the ABA Journal in an e-mail. “They will still be fully published in print, in the newsstand guide, as has been the case now for many years. They will still be online on U.S. News.”
The ABA Journal profiled Morse, who created the U.S. News law school rankings, in its April 2008 cover story The Rankings Czar.
U.S. News will also maintain an online presence and offer “selected, single-topic” print materials for newsstand sales, according to an internal U.S. News memo provided by Jim Romenesko on the Poynter Institute’s website.
“Our emphasis on rankings and research content is the right path, making us an essential information source in a commoditized marketplace,” states the memo from president Bill Holiber and editor Brian Kelly.
“We’re really focusing on digital,” Kelly said in a phone interview with Mediaweek. “Print is a really small part of our business. We’re really stressing the rankings we do. We’ve added a bunch of new products. We see ourselves moving more and more down that road. We average at least 8 to 9 million uniques [online] a month.”
This year, for the first time, U.S. News endeavored to rank law firms, partnering with Best Lawyers to rank nearly 9,000 firms in 81 practice areas in 171 metropolitan areas and seven states, although there was no overall top-to-bottom ranking as there is for law schools.
The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 is probing how such rankings operate, and at a commission meeting last month, Steven Naifeh, a founder and editor of Best Lawyers, invited the commission to “check out” the methodology used in the U.S. News survey, which he said is not only more rigorous than most but is completely spelled out in the survey’s accompanying materials.
U.S. News was a weekly magazine that became a biweekly and then a monthly publication in 2009. Its circulation dropped to 1,269,260 from 1,721,377 the year before, Newscore reported, citing an estimate from the Magazine Publishers of America.
Last updated at 7:43 p.m. to include comments from Morse.
