Blogging and the Courts

Remarks –FJC Conference for Chief Judges
Blogging and the Courts
April 27, 2007

Good morning. My name is Sheldon Snook, and I’m the Administrative Assistant to Chief Judge Thomas Hogan at the District Court here in DC. Thanks to all of you for having me here this morning. As AA, my responsibilities include serving as media liaison for the Court. In that role, David ask that I speak to you this morning about bloggers and the court, particularly in light of our experience with the Scooter Libby trial, which ended early last month.

Anytime we have a high-profile event, I meet with the presiding judge, usually months in advance, to discuss logistics for the trial–how we’ll handle security, crowd control, VIP witnesses, and the media. Our courtrooms can seat about 100 people, so, depending on the level of interest, I typically recommend that we reserve about 40 seats for the media, 20 for the parties, family, and lawyers for witnesses, and around 40 for the public. We also decide whether to use passes to control who gets into the courtroom, and how the passes will be distributed.

Traditionally, our court has issued media credentials based on factors such as: 1) whether the requestor is from an established (respectable) media outlet, as indicated by requiring that the request be made on their organization’s letterhead; 2) whether the requestor will commit to being present every day; 3) the requestor’s circulation or audience size; and 4) chronologically, when the request is made. We also try to make sure our local media get in. As you can imagine, the bloggers presented a novel issue because they really don’t fit well into the criteria traditionally have used to determine who should be credentialed.

Recognizing that there would be intense interest in the trial, including, and maybe in particular, by the bloggers, we decided to try letting in a handful of bloggers, we thought in the range of 5-6, to conduct a test case of how letting bloggers into the court might work out.

One of the key things we did that allowed us to do this was to set up a media room for the Libby trial. Last year Chief Judge Hogan sent me an article he thought was interesting about how our colleagues at the district court in Houston had handled media for the Enron trials. I took a look and thought it was a great idea, so we copied it shamelessly for Libby. Basically, we ran a closed-circuit audio and video feed from Judge Walton’s courtroom downstairs to a room on the first floor of the courthouse. We treated the media room as an extension of the courtroom itself, with almost all the same rules–no electronic broadcasting, no cell phones, etc. However, we did set up wireless internet access, so a reporter or blogger could view the proceedings and report in real-time what was happening. Because of that, at least half of the traditional media and bloggers, it turned out to be about 40 on any given day, actually preferred seating in the media room, rather than the courtroom itself, where no electronic devices could be used. This turned out to be something Judge Walton liked, because instead of having reporters stampede out of the courtroom when something important happened, most of the reporters remained seated, knowing that their colleagues downstairs were reporting it as it happened.

When we knew we could accommodate up to 80 or so reporters, we began talking to the bloggers who had asked to be credentialed. When I told them that we typically base our decision on whether an organization would commit to being there every day, they naturally began to form consortia that helped meet our requirement, and also allowed them to rotate in and out from day to day so they could maintain their work and personal lives.

My impressions of how the bloggers worked? I do think, in general, the bloggers were able to provide a level of detail for their readers that a general audience might have found esoteric–e.g., including a detailed explanation of CIPA and how it works. The bloggers also were able to provide real-time feeds of what was happening, rather than an article or story that might be updated just once a day. And the bloggers were able to offer–for want of a better word–spice, to the proceedings, saying things, often humorous, that wouldn’t be acceptable for the traditional media.

In the end, I think the bloggers, some of whom had written books about the events leading up to the trial, helped the reporting. In the media room, it was common for the reporters and bloggers to confer about things like time-lines, what a witness said, why the lawyers were following a particular strategy, etc. This helped the reporters get the story right, and it informed the readers of the blogs, some of whom were reading every word that was written.

For those of you who have to face this issue of letting bloggers into the courtroom for a high profile proceeding, I can’t give you a definitive answer about to handle to it. But I can suggest that you think about some of the things we encountered and did: 1) reserve a limited number of seats for bloggers, at least on a trial basis; 2) avoid using the term “credentialed” for bloggers and instead just give them “reserved seating”; and 3) for those of you brave enough to get into credentialing bloggers, good luck.