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Updates on live-blogging of trials

By Mark Obbie

I wanted to make note of a flurry of reports and comments on live-blogging of trials:The ABA Journal's Debra Cassens Weiss wrote this informative, link-filled story focusing on an Iowa fraud prosecution that Trish Mehaffey of the Cedar Rapids Gazette covered from the courtroom on this blog. Mehaffey's coverage has the distinction of occurring in a federal courtroom, which is rare.Lexblog's Lisa Kennelly reports and comments on the same case, with informative quotes from Mehaffey about the mechanics of the experiment.Litigation PR expert Bob Bork tipped me off to these developments with this post, where he speculates on how the growing use of live-blogging of trials will affect litigants' PR strategies.I remain a skeptic, as I said back during the Libby trial and recently on the question of Twitter coverage of trials. While I'm all for increasing courts' public access by journalists and citizens, and applaud the bloggers and judges who are experimenting, I have a fundamental problem with these forms: they're not mass media storytelling, because they don't clearly provide the full context of a case to the casual reader. It's great if you're already obsessively following a case; not so great if you're among the vast majority of readers who aren't, and who are excluded from the insider nature of this conversation. But I would love to see talented writers figure out ways around these problems, perhaps by linking to background that provides the necessary explanations of what preceded the action that we're now covering play by play. I look forward to discussing such issues with two upcoming speakers in our law, politics, and media series here at Syracuse University: the aforementioned Bork, and the Houston Chronicle's Mary Flood.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on January 23, 2009 (boomark / email).