After three years as editor and publisher of the ABA Journal and 18 years as a member of the editorial staff, Molly McDonough is leaving the magazine after the next issue is put to bed on Oct. 4.
Her decision to leave comes after several years of ABA-imposed budget cuts at the magazine and ahead of the magazine’s forced move to a new .org website platform that does not support all of the editorial and advertising features now available on ABAJournal.com.
The move also follows the ABA’s approval of a resolution at its annual meeting last month that took financial control of the Journal away from its board of editors — an oversight board of nine elected ABA members as well as the ABA president, president-elect, House of Delegates chair, and treasurer.
“The toughest part of leaving is leaving a professional staff of consummately talented people who are mission driven and who care about fairness, justice and being a voice for the underrepresented,” McDonough said. “But I can’t stomach what is on the horizon for ABAJournal.com. The new site is flawed and not built for editorial publishing.”
[Disclosure: From 1999 to 2001, McDonough was an editor at American Lawyer Media, reporting to me as editor-in-chief.]
Over the last three years, the ABA has cut the Journal’s budget from $7 million to $4 million. The Journal has reduced its frequency from 12 to six issues a year, reduced its page count, and laid off staff.
On top of that, the resolution last month changing the ABA bylaws was seen by some ABA insiders as a power grab to take away the magazine’s journalistic independence.
But McDonough said it was neither the budget cuts nor the resolution that pushed her to resign.
“When I took this job there years ago, I knew almost
