Dave Winer at a UC-Berkeley event on newspaper journalism:
I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.
New York Times, same day:
Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment, claiming that a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial. And on Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded before the verdict that the judge declare a mistrial because a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror had even told his readers that a “big announcement” was coming on Monday.
Winer waited all that time to get a chance to speak, and yet he couldn’t come up with a worse example if he tried. Judges and attorneys are legally prohibited from writing accounts of an ongoing trial on their blogs or Twitter. They would risk mistrials and professional sanction. Jurors risk mistrials as well by covering themselves. Even after the fact, participants in a trial have to be careful about what they say because it could become grounds for appeal. There are many other examples where professional rules, confidentiality requirements or non-disclosure agreements would prevent citizens from reporting their own news. There’s no way in hell the public will get court news from the participants. And that’s Winer’s example of why we don’t need newspapers? The journalists in the crowd must have loved his naivete.
it is all about sampling truth. getting a little splice of life. the big picture just doesn’t matter to these guys. everything is relative for Winer… and so the judicial system (while we know is not always or maybe even rarely is justice)…, it is an attempt to create some meaning. these guys enjoy the schizophrenia of it all. if you create multiple accounts and follow Winer you will find out how fast multiple realities can congregate miraculously into a tyranny that caters to only him.
There already IS one person who officially reports on a trial: the Court Reporter. You know, the man or woman with the little stenography machine, writing down everything said in the courtroom.
“Judges and attorneys are legally prohibited from writing accounts of an ongoing trial on their blogs or Twitter.”
No, they’re not. They don’t do it because it’s not a good idea, not because they’re forbidden from doing so.
Also, just because the word “reporter” is in “court reporter” doesn’t mean they do the same thing as a newspaper reporter does. A court reporter transcribes proceedings, nothing more and nothing less. They don’t check facts, they don’t analyze, they write down what is done and said and ONLY what is done or said.
I wasn’t clear. I meant that there would be legal implications for judges and attorneys if they blogged about a trial. The judge’s impartiality would be called into question and anything he wrote could be grounds for appeal. Defense lawyers would risk violating attorney-client privilege if they revealed anything about the case and risk contempt of court if they were critical of the judge’s decisions.
Oh boy, here comes Dave’s next screed, this one with a major helping of ego-pumping: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/19/theRebootOfJournalism.html
The reference to his most recent conversation with Jay Rosen puzzles me. This is a smart guy, with the credibility to be invited as a guest on Charlie Rose, and who is presumably quite busy with his post at NYU. How is it that he has the time and patience to take calls from his Winerness?
On a related note, I think this commenter gets to the nub of Dave’s argument: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/19/theRebootOfJournalism.html#comment-7355848 This is one of the major problem’s I’ve found his vision. “Sources” don’t necessarily care to blog. I think by this point, we’re probably fairly close to a blogging critical mass. The technology is readily available for any person to set up a blog immediately, with a very gentle learning curve. “Sources” who want to get the word out can do it already. The fact remains that there are millions of people who don’t care for it. We can set aside the problems of aggregating thousands of disparate blogs for the average consumer, which is not inconsequential, and of people in positions like judges and juries who cannot or should not be blogging, in the face of this impediment to Dave’s vision of journalism rebooted. Reporters do a yeoman’s service in actually interviewing subjects everyday to bring stories to light that are not mere commentary or a narrative about one’s experience using a new product purchased from Amazon.
I love Winer’s reaction to a blog post about the event:
“He could have just as easily, and more fairly, positioned me as “former Harvard researcher” or a leading developer of Internet standards.”
Poor guy can’t win for losing.
“The judge’s impartiality would be called into question and anything he wrote could be grounds for appeal.”
Eh. Yes, there are some things a judge could write that would cause this kind of problem. No (smart) judge would write those things though. There are plenty of things both judges and attorneys could write that would be totally fine.
As for a judge’s blog post creating grounds for appeal: not likely at all. The judge having an opinion isn’t reversible error. It might be used as evidence of an error, but the blog post itself is unlikely to be the source of it.
I think you have a slightly skewed impression of how these things work.