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Insight on digital media from the team at LexBlog, Inc.

Michelle Newblom makes the transition from intern to full-time employee at LexBlog

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Illustration by Greg Storey

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Publishing is a cornerstone of LexBlog’s mission to inform the world about the power of legal blogging. Our efforts at building community and providing blogging services are channeled through our ability to publish timely and informative material across the web. As our ambitions grow alongside the evolution of the Internet, it’s important that we keep our edge in this industry. And essential to that growth is finding team members who align with our mission and have the skills and passion to move things forward.

With that, LexBlog is delighted to announce that we have promoted Michelle Newblom to a full-time position on our Publishing team! Michelle previously worked with LexBlog as an intern starting in July 2020. 

“I’m passionate about highlighting voices, and working at LexBlog allows me to do just that. Working on the Publishing team, we’re helping legal bloggers develop their blogs, which in turn serves a greater purpose—making the law more accessible.” 

Michelle has already contributed significantly to LexBlog’s publishing efforts. Her extended stay as a full-time employee will continue adding value to the company through her passion for writing. 

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer since the first grade—I had a big clunky desktop computer with no internet access that I’d type all my stories on. That passion for writing never left and when I got to college I was a little worried since, you know, reality set in and I wasn’t sure how to make a living while still doing what I wanted. Luckily, I was introduced to a lot of options.”

As with many people, Michelle’s career path took shape as she progressed through college.

“I worked at our school paper all four years—holding basically every position at some point such as staff writer, Sports Editor, Copy Chief and was the Editor-in-Chief for a full year. I lived in Newport Beach for a summer and did freelance work for a couple of different newspapers down there. I also worked on our school’s undergraduate research journal for a year and had an internship at SagaCity Media where I did magazine work for a while. That internship kind of kick-started my desire to work in publishing as a whole.”

After college, Michelle ended up taking an opportunity to work for a magazine in Rome, Italy—but then the pandemic hit, and those plans came to a screeching halt as countries closed their borders. Instead, she decided to return to her school’s track team for a fifth year and possibly work a writing job. That writing job ended up being one here at LexBlog.

“I came on working 20 hours a week and was responsible for updating the LexBlog site daily and running our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram pages. This was right around the inception of This Week in Legal Blogging so I did a lot of transcribing of those talks as well as live tweeting them. A cool project I got to work on was Democracy Docket, and I helped out on the back end as well as crafting the promotional piece we put out when it launched.”

As Michelle’s working hours at LexBlog increased, her responsibilities grew to include creating social videos, editing and publishing for the TWILB podcast weekly, writing New to the Community bi-weekly, contributing to the LexBlog resource center, starting her own blog, re-launching Top 10 in Law Blogs (which she is working on turning into a weekly podcast) and writing and editing weekly for 99 Park Row.

Perhaps by no coincidence, Michelle’s favorite animal is the penguin, and her favorite publishing house is Penguin Random House. So maybe one day, we will see her work featured there.

“I would love to work in the book publishing industry and live in New York. My passion for creative writing is still there—if I could fully support myself writing fiction one day that would be the dream. Now that track is over I’ve made time for that again, and right now I’m taking a creative writing class at Hugo House. Being an editor at a magazine, an agent or book editor in the publishing world, even having a stint writing at a big newspaper would be very cool options. But, writing fiction is the ultimate goal.” 

We’re thrilled to have Michelle officially join the LexBlog team, bringing with her a combination of passion, education, and experience in writing and publishing.

“I’m eager to continue growing in this role and finding new ways to build this body of secondary law we currently have and help individuals find their writing voice.”

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