We’ve seen a number of emails go back and forth on UK LIS LAW over the past few weeks about Legal Week’s? “Partnership Club” and wondered what it might be…
One UK librarian has been collecting information from other legal librarians and KM’s around the country to see if the list readership could get a general idea what Legal Week are actually offering.
Below we publish some extracts from the comments.. and it looks as though from what’s being said that the essence of the Partnership Club is Legal Week’s attempt to up subscription sales which have obviously declined along with advertising revenue in 2009
It appears that Legal Week are trying to get firms/people to do three things
- Sign up for multiple print subs
- Sign up for an online subscription
- Pay to get their content into Legal Week
In essence get users pay for content received and not rely on the free weekly/daily update email newsletters that Legal Week send out to desktops and inboxes
But as one commenter says .. the presentation of the “Partnership Package” is rather “woolly” so nobody really knows what the supposed advantages are and it appears that prices are not being discounted that much
Here are a few comments
“I asked all those FE’s & Partners who used to get a free copy of Legal Week what they thought of the package and none of them wanted to subscribe so we ended up just taking the normal subscription for one copy to be circulated to a few interested parties ! Most people are happy with the free email alerter and are not bothered about the added extras
“We’re curently negotiating. I’ve found the process quite difficult ..not least because of the vague nature of the partnership club benefits that are being offered…Legal; Week have been keen to point out that they want to”tailor” these benefits without really explaining what the benefits might be …./…… I blanket emailed our casehandlers about whether they would still want Legal Week if access wasn’t free. I didn’t get a huge response”
“We have decided not to join this club. We were quoted a prioce of more than ?2,000 and we felt the journal was not worth this amount of money.. we would rather spend the money on other things”
And although it appears some firms are taking on the 20 partner price they all seem rather wary of it. It looks as though it might be too little too late for Legal Week on the subscription sales front.. might have been a better idea for them to have sold subs when times were good rather than scrabbling now to see where they can find subscription revenues either print or online.
All we can surmise is that advertising revenues must have gone from bad to dire.
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