Peter Sloan and Deborah Juhnke were not into the idea of blogging. In fact, none of Husch Blackwell’s information governance group was.
Sensitive to the time of the team, Juhnke and Sloan saw blogging as a potential time suck; to do it and do it well would be a hog on the already limited number of hours they had in the day to do their work. But about a year ago, they realized that the data base focus and digital presence of the practice was too important. So they dove in and launched Byte Back…and loved it.
“We realized it was actually quite fun; it was part of something we’re passionate about; these are great, fascinating issues—particularly the interplay of these things,” said Sloan, a partner at Husch Blackwell. “Internally we have about 20 lawyers and other professionals in our group. It became a way for us to talk about the interplay of information governance issues, to fuel that conversation internally, and then share it with others.”
On their blog, they could get into the real information governance. Though Sloan says much of the public dialogue around information governance falls to privacy and data security, there’s so much more to the practice; records retention and e-discovery, to name a few. And though these issues often get siloed, there’s a lot of overlap and exchange between them. The blog became a promising venue for the group to explore, explain, and knock around in information governance, both internally and externally, while also highlighting areas that companies might miss.
Their editorial team is made up of those who believe in the power of blogging, but also represent a whole range of topic knowledge. Among their team they have people with backgrounds as certified record manager, FBI special agents who dealt with cybercrime, and more, which helps inform their work and their readers on Byte Back.
“We blog because we fundamentally believe that information governance as a concept or a discipline is gradually taking hold, especially as companies are seeing information as more of a business asset. It’s not just privacy and data security, but like other assets has more day-to-day management, and we want to make sure we cover all those bases,” said Juhnke, who serves as the director of the group. “There’s a whole panel of editors…and each of us have a different subject matter expertise. Having several people like that helps us cover the universe as best we can.”
But part of what’s made them so successful has been their clear focus in the area. There’s a variety of topics covered under the umbrella of information guidance, but the blog isn’t just putting out reporting just to put out blog posts. Information governance can be a messy and volatile world, and the team at Byte Back don’t think the world needs yet another person purely putting issues on the record. They need to be adding something new to the conversation.
So when writers and editors on the team sit down to produce content the stories are guided by two questions: Firstly, so what? And secondly, then what do we do about this?
“We decided that while we comment on breaking news from time to time, that’s not our goal, to be the news source. Instead the tone we wanted in the approach is kind of akin to second day coverage. ‘As you may already know, this thing happened,’ or ‘This is actually different than most folks are perceiving it,’ or ‘Does this yield some insight into what your organization’s next move should be,’” said Sloan.
“We’re not the news outlet, we’re not going to faithfully break the news of every payment card breach that happens. Instead we’re looking around for whether this advances the practical discussion of how organizations can deal with compliance and value around information management…If there’s something that has captured the public attention we can use that to illustrate a beat or a theme [of the blog] then we’ll go there. But not simply to be the 47th blog post on Ashley Madison, because there were 46 that came before us.”
Which is not to say they don’t cover breaking news; like any blog that relates to privacy issues they’re up to their ears in privacy news. But Byte Back writers are careful to be selective with their time, their space, and their style.
And though they only launched this past spring, they’ve got an understanding of how to utilize that to the fullest on the blog: Even lawyers trolling the blogs for content short on time still like music from the 1970s, or sports, or movies, or reading content with some flavor. It also means making sure the text doesn’t swing too far to either the technological or legal side; just because they’re covering the same topics as their law reviews, doesn’t mean they have to be written the same way.
“It’s not an either or world, so we try to do as many different things as possible. I’m a 55-year-old person who’s been a practicing lawyer for 30 years. I wrote two law review articles last year because that was a good venue to dig deeply into information governance or data security in a way that would accommodate 300 footnotes. But a blog is a totally different way of writing and a different way of communicating. And that’s the fun of the challenge; getting to convey inside questions, recommendations, good practices, wrapped in an interesting story that’s just 400-1100 words,” said Sloan.
Still, Sloan finds the evolution of the blog to be a moving target—which is part of the fun. As they come up on a year after the impetus of the blog, he and Juhnke look back fondly on their “ill-informed” skepticism of blogging. As it turns out, it’s not so hard after all.
“Part of it is getting into the swing of it and practice,” said Juhnke. “But I think the bottom line is if you have something to say then it’s easy.”