Law Professor Creates Successful Conservative Blog in a Predominately Liberal Community
- Tara Stacy
- Mar 31, 2016
- 2 min read
It's no secret that Ithaca, NY is a predominately liberal community. 53% of the city's population according to the last census is college-aged students due to both Cornell University and the recently famously progressive Ithaca College.
However, one Cornell law professor saw a demographic that he felt needed their own outlet: coverage of conservative issues nationwide. In 2008, William Jacobson created his blog Legal Insurrection using Google Blogger.
Jacobson was not familiar with blogging, and got the idea from a liberal friend that told him that while Jacobson didn't convince him to change his political leanings, he explained and defended the conservative viewpoint better than anyone he knew. He suggested the Jacobson start a blog.
Since 2008 Jacobson has been able to generate revenue from his blog through ads and donations from loyal readers. Jacobson has also started a separate website called College Insurrection. It was originally supposed to be a sounding board for conservative college students across the country, but has since become more of a page that links to conservative pieces from other outlets that are relevant to college-aged people.
One of the reasons that Legal Insurrection has done so well over the years is because of Jacobson's loyal readers and commenters. He was the sole blogger on the site for a few years, and now has several contributors as well. Many of his contributors have been pulled from his comments section.
He has been featured on the Drudge Report, the New York Times, Gothamist and many more.
I found Jacobson so interesting simply because he is such an outlier in his community. Before his blog really took off, he pitched it to family members and friends, who shared it with community members. He is a great example of an independent media success story, because he did what so many other outlets have done in the past: he found a niche in the community and he capitalized on it.
Jacobson has also said that if he lived in a larger community like New York or Washington D.C., he would be able to make television appearances and if he was not a professor he would be able to devote more time to blogging and even make a living off of it. However, he really enjoys what he does at Cornell with students, and that just shows how great it is that blogging allows people that may not have a degree in journalism or want to pursue it as a full time job to be able to voice their opinion and educate others.
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