Legal Research

Associated Press Using Twitter, Blog to Cover Sotomayor Confirmation Hearings

By Connie Crosby

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s confirmation hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor?s nomination to be associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court begin Monday morning. She will be on Capitol Hill undergoing questioning by the senators during the next week.

Of all the news outlets planning coverage, perhaps the most interesting is Associated Press. Their plan is to have live coverage via Twitter feed @AP_Courtside. They will be taking it a step further by taking questions and directions on coverage for their blog from their readers via Twitter, according to their blog post yesterday at Yahoo! News.

According to a write-up by The Nieman Journalism Lab, AP’s Jim Kennedy explained:

?This all stems back to a larger project that we?re working on to open up our coverage and engage users,? he says. ?We are looking to do things beyond writing stories, taking pictures, and shooting video. This big question here is: can a news agency have these kind of interactions even as it supplies content to our customers??

?We are not using Twitter to break news,? Kennedy said. ?We want to point to the blog or point to our stories. We may use the blog to write about things that won?t make it into our other stories, but we?re not using either platform to scoop ourselves.?

According to the Wikipedia entry, Judge Sotomayor is:

a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On May 26, 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter. If confirmed, she would be the Court’s 111th justice, its first Hispanic justice, and its third female justice.

For more details about AP’s plans, see the article by The Nieman Journalism Lab: The Associated Press tries courtside crowdsourcing Sotomayor coverage.  Tags they will be using appear to be #Sotomayor, #SupremeCourt, and #SCOTUS.

See also CNN’s plans in Turner Newsroom: CNN Plans Comprehensive Coverage of Sotomayor Hearings.

For more information about Judge Sotomayor, see also her Judgepedia entry.

Story hat tip to Mathew Ingram via Twitter.   Photo credit: photo by Jay Tamboli. Used under Creative Commons licensing.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on July 10, 2009 (boomark / email).