Fred von Lohmann pointed to this announcement of the new, improved SCOTUSblog. The blog has always been a go-to site for professionals and amateurs like myself who are trying to puzzle out what the various Supreme Court pronouncements and goings-on actually mean.

The blog now is big enough to support four full-time employees, with the backing of Bloomberg Law. Bloomberg remains a paid commercial service, but here they are doing a really awesome thing in sponsoring a fully free open and accessible source of high-quality analysis and content. In addition, SCOTUSblog is promising to offer more non-text content such as audio and video. My guess is that without someone to foot the bill they couldn't afford the extra bandwidth costs that these kind of content incur.

As sole sponsor Bloomberg Law gets props both in the site banner and in advertising space in the right-hand column. It will be interesting to see how they use these spaces and what influences and effects they have on the site in the future. As always I remain interested in sponsorship (patronage) business models and how they play out for creative folk everywhere.