The Dispatch, a right-of-center political news and commentary start-up, plans to keep the legal news website available at no cost. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The White House has lately created a torrent of legal news, issuing executive orders that are being met with near-instant challenges in the judiciary.
That has put a spotlight on SCOTUSblog, a website that has been a go-to destination for news and analysis on all things related to the Supreme Court for decades. (SCOTUS is an acronym for Supreme Court of the United States.) Amy Howe, one half of the husband-and-wife team that founded the blog in 2002, spends hours every June parsing the court’s rulings with Talmudic precision.
But now, SCOTUSblog has some news of its own. The site is being acquired by The Dispatch, a right-of-center political news and commentary start-up founded by the conservative journalists Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. The deal is part of a strategy to “double down on rigorous reporting and analysis in topic areas where we already have meaningful advantages,” Michael Rothman, the start-up’s president, said.
“We plan to replicate this approach with other subjects, including national security, tech, education and conservation,” he added. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
SCOTUSblog is something of a outlier in the quirky annals of digital media. Though blogging has fallen out of favor as social media has grown increasingly popular, SCOTUSblog, with its die-hard readership of legal obsessives, has remained curiously durable. Specialization has been a selling point among digital publishers that have endured, such as the tech site The Information or the travel industry news site Skift.
The nonprofit that owns SCOTUSblog is being dissolved as part of the deal, and the site’s archives and web address are being transferred to The Dispatch. Ms. Howe and some of SCOTUSblog’s key employees are signing long-term contracts with their new employer, part of an effort to keep the site’s editorial voice intact.
Sarah Isgur, an editor at The Dispatch who co-hosts a podcast on legal issues called “Advisory Opinions,” said in an interview that the acquisition would drastically raise the company’s profile among legal news watchers at a crucial time for the judiciary.
“SCOTUSblog is Kleenex,” Ms. Isgur said. “It is the brand and the product.”
“As Congress has shrunk,” she added, “the Supreme Court and the courts as a whole have risen in importance in terms of how decisions are getting made at the federal level.”
SCOTUSblog is being sold months after Tom Goldstein, a co-founder and Ms. Howe’s husband, was indicted on charges of tax evasion that the government said were related to his activities as an ultrahigh-stakes poker player. Mr. Goldstein will not be part of the site as it transitions to The Dispatch, Mr. Rothman said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Goldstein has said he has an “impeccable reputation” and intends to contest the charges.
The Dispatch will keep articles on SCOTUSblog available at no cost, though it plans to develop paid products for legal professionals in the coming months, Mr. Rothman said.