Texas Lawyer goes from weekly to monthly

Texas Lawyer, an ALM publication, has gone from a weekly to a monthly print publication.

“Texas Lawyer was launched as a weekly newspaper in 1985 with the mission of providing news and insights to the Texas legal community,” said George Haj, regional editor in chief for American Lawer publications in Texas, Florida and Georgia. “As we’ve focused more on digital the last few years, the print product became more and more of a challenge.

“The more content we delivered to the web, the harder it was to provide fresh content for readers in a weekly print publication. Most of what we put in the newspaper had already appeared on the web site. And editors were spending a lot of time getting the weekly print newspaper out the door.”

The first issue of the magazine went to readers Monday, and Haj said the content is already doing extremely well on its web site. The cover story on national law firms stampeding to Houston despite the drop in oil prices has been leading the site in visits and page views all morning.

“The editor-in-chief of Texas Lawyer, Heather Nevitt, and her team have done an extraordinary job juggling three huge tasks since the first of the year – continuing to deliver breaking news on the web site, planning and executing a new magazine and also putting out the weekly through its last issue on March 28,” said Haj.

Web traffic was up at the Texas Lawyer site by 20 percent in January 2016 compared with January the year before.

ALM produces everything from monthly magazines — its flagship is the American Lawyer — to dailies in New York, Miami and Atlanta, and weeklies in other markets.

“We’re constantly looking at all of our products to see how they mesh with our digital-first philosophy and what each market needs from us,” said Haj. “I expect you’ll be hearing about changes in selected markets in the months to come.”