There’s a new issue of the Law Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best law stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• The Other Side of the Story on The Lawyer Who Represented Himself

• Which Industries to Target Now in Law Firm Marketing

• On Trademark Enforcement & Protection: Is Twitter on Target or Off the Mark?

• Law Humor: Confirmation Hearings of Master Yoda, Day Two

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There’s a new issue of In the Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best content marketing and social media stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Why Email Marketing is Dead (And How to Bring it Back to Life)

• Social Media Mavens - An Interview with PepsiCo’s Bonin Bough

• Best Practices for Journalists Curating the Web: New York Times Bits Blog “What We’re Reading”

• How to Motivate People to Buy

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There’s a new issue of the Fashion Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best fashion stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Checking In With Ikram Goldman, Michelle Obama’s Go-To Gal

• Menswear-Inspired Shoes

• Where Have All the Eyebrows Gone?

• Video Campaign. Don’t Shop, Seriously? You Can’t Afford it!

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There’s a new issue of the Health Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best health stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Will Obama’s plan mirror the 1994 Clinton failure?

• Mom’s Diet Before Conception May Affect Baby

• FDA Lays Framework for Expedited H1N1 Vaccine Approvals

• Alarming Africa male gay HIV rate

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The working title for this post was “The Mouse That Roared,” a riff on the mascot of ESPN’s majority owner, Disney. But there’s nothing mouse-like about ESPN. And, unlike the film of the same title, ESPN isn’t marching on newspapers’ turf with white flags at the ready. The 30-year-old network calls itself the “Worldwide Leader in Sports,” a nearly irrefutable claim when one tallies the Borg-like reach of its cable channels, local radio affiliates, blogs, international sites and more.

Accordingly, tremors from Sunday’s news that ESPN is adding local sports coverage – with plans to go hyper-local (think softball leagues) – have rippled well beyond editors’ offices. With local readers and ad dollars in the crosshairs of sports media’s biggest, best-funded promotional howitzer, this is a vastly bigger worry for newspapers than Google News’ parasitical attributes.

Why? Consider this stat from the Times story: “In less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June… Second place went to the Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors.”

What’s amazing is not that it happened, it’s the velocity with which it happened. The Tribune has been the authority on Chicago sports for 162 years; ESPN only needed three months to undo that.

And it’s not just the sports desk that should be worried. Last month, the Huffington Post announced its plans to expand into local news. Resistance is futile.

Of course, competition from ESPN, HuffPo and other national outlets isn’t news to newspapers, which have traditionally relied on the defense that national outlets lack the well-sourced local beat reporters to compete head to head.

Until now,as Dan Shanoff notes:

Indeed, ESPN has been poaching talent from local papers for years, a trend exacerbated by local newsrooms’ collapsing budgets. Now, it appears, these chickens have come home to roost.

Fortunately for newspapers, this is a war that can be waged on the cheap. According to the Times article, ESPN primarily will use existing resources and need only 15 new staff members to run the Dallas, Los Angeles and New York properties.

How is going local such a high-leverage move for ESPN, HuffPo, et al? In a word, aggregation. Check out ESPN’s Rumor Central pages, where ESPN culls non-ESPN content by topic area, bundles it with internally-generated content, and charges its “Insiders” subscribers for access. Per Shanoff:

Actually, it can be more efficient, scalable and effective than that. Just ask OneSpot clients like the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle or others. Instead of relying solely on the selection of a single editor, blogger or intern, these organizations tap into the hive mind of thousands of editors, bloggers, Twitterers and others who link to the best of the web. The key is quality content aggregation with smart curation to select the best of the best. And, as ESPN has proven, quality, curated content can also be monetized. Let us show you how.

ESPN’s blitzkrieg into local markets may resemble Amazon.com’s takeover of so many retail categories. Both are category-killer brands executing ruthlessly clever online strategies while incumbents, beholden to brick-and-mortar interests and budgets, struggle to keep up. But ESPN is winning by outsmarting, rather than outspending. With nimbleness and creativity, newspapers can fight fire with fire.

There’s a new issue of the Law Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best law stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• LiveBlog of Judge Sotomayor’s Confirmation Hearings

• What are Supreme Court confirmation hearings good for?

• The Place of Women on the Court

• If Bloggers Must Disclose, Why Shouldn’t the Bar Associations?

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There’s a new issue of In the Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best content marketing and social media stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Facebook’s Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users

• Why Teens Aren’t Using Twitter: It Doesn’t Feel Safe

• Introducing the Google Chrome OS

• How will you respond to a customer complaint in the age of Social Media?

To read these stories and more, check out our newsletter: In the Spotlight

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There’s a new issue of the Fashion Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best fashion stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Meet the Next Project Runway Cast

• Paris Couture Fall ‘09. Christian Lacroix Forever.

• Summer Hats

• Betsey Johnson Wants to Retire After Her September Show

To read these stories and more, check out our newsletter: Fashion Spotlight

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There’s a new issue of the Health Spotlight: the biweekly email newsletter highlighting the best health stories from around the web, found automatically by OneSpot from over 500,000 different sources.

This issue’s stories include:

• Want Tylenol? You May Need Rx

• As 23 states get even fatter, heavy costs loom

• Pundits Ponder Whether Palin Had Postpartum Depression

• Vegetarians ‘avoid more cancers’

To read these stories and more, check out our newsletter: Health Spotlight

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Michael Jackson’s death has been receiving a ton of coverage, both from media outlets and on social media sites. During his memorial, Facebook averaged 6,000 status updates per minute. Michael Jackson was truly an icon and will be missed.

I was tweeting during the memorial and one user mentioned that people are grieving more for Michael than they did when Diana died. I initially responded that it was because Michael was an American icon (arguably global), whereas Diana was fairly isolated to the UK. After thinking it over, I realized that all this grief and coverage of Michael’s death was amplified because of social networks: real time, minute-by-minute coverage and commentary. Twitter, much less any social network, did not exist when Diana died.

I also began to wonder if we would ever see this sort of world-wide pause for any modern celebrity. Do we have any icons today in a world of Twitterlebrities? Michael Jackson was in the limelight for over 3 decades, entertaining audiences world-wide. He contributed greatly not only to music, but to the entire entertainment industry: many actors and models gained popularity from appearing in Michael’s videos and those same videos helped to shape MTV. Few have received the mass grieving of Michael, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, and Princess Diana.

There are a couple of icons still present today that may elicit world-wide news, but not many: Madonna (though, of late she has been more tabloid fodder than entertainment), Oprah, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, and a few may grieve for Britney. These stars have been entertaining for at least a decade. Can you think of any other major timeless entertainers?

The presence of social networks changed the interaction around Michael’s death, but they also have changed the way celebrities are perceived, popularized, and destroyed. Everyone has access to content production these days, thus everyone can truly get their Andy Warhol “15 minutes of fame.” But as soon as one thing hits big, something else comes along to replace it. Take, for instance, Susan Boyle. She became an internet sensation overnight after appearing on “Britain’s Got Talent.” All the talk shows wanted to interview her, people were tweeting and retweeting her video, and her performance became water cooler fodder. However, I was watching “America’s Got Talent” the other night and couldn’t even remember her name, much less the name of anyone who has won these talent competitions. “Celebrity” has become a fleeting concept.

Susan Boyle is an extreme case of here today, gone tomorrow. But many entertainers these days have abbreviated careers thanks to social media and mass quantities of content/noise to consume. We are no longer in the era of 4 TV channels to watch, 5 movie production studios, and a handfull of record labels. Anyone can produce content; individual audience members are their own gatekeeper. We are in an era where obtaining celebrity status is brief: just a blip on the radar.

“It all went by so fast, didn’t it? I wish I could do it all over again, I really do.”- Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson will be remembered forever (or at least as long as my lifetime) because he came from an era of superstars, with only a handful received the money, promotion, and attention needed to rise above other artists. We need our global grieving period because it is nearly impossible to be in this world and not know who Michael Jackson was or not know his songs (unless you were born after 2000). While we may grieve like this when Madonna dies (if she ever does), do you think we would mourn the deaths of Paris Hilton, Megan Fox, or Kim Kardashian? What about Ashton Kutcher, Miley Cyrus, or Amy Winehouse (if she isn’t already dead)? In this era of “blip” celebrity, few entertainers are known world wide; few entertainers will be remembered a decade from now; few entertainers will have the impact Michael Jackson had on the world.