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Ron Sylvester is a Wichita Eagle reporter who came up with a really neat way to cover stories.

Tweet them.

“Last May, we wrote here about Ron Sylvester, the Wichita Eagle reporter who was covering a capital murder trial through a series of Twitter posts - each capped at 140 characters,” posts Robert J. Ambrogi on Legal Blog Watch.

He goes on »»»

At her blog Deliberations, lawyer Anne Reed called Sylvester’s work “Twitter journalism.” Now, he’s speaking up in defense of tweeting in a Colorado courtroom. Earlier this week, a judge in Boulder, Colo., dismissed the objections of prosecutors and defense lawyers in a child-abuse case and ruled that the use of cell phones and computers will be permitted in the courtroom.

According to reports in the Boulder Daily Camera and The Colorado Independent, lawyers objected that live-blogging and tweeting the sensational case could interfere with defendant Alex Midyette’s right to a fair trial by tipping sequestered witnesses to proceedings in the courtroom.

But Boulder District Judge Lael Montgomery said she would give clear instructions to jurors to refrain from reading or viewing any media accounts of the case. “I think there are other manageable options and less restrictive options than shutting down the flow of information during the trial,” she said.

Ambrogi points out at least two other newspapers have Twittered in a courtroom.

“A newspaper in Spokane, Wash., the Spokesman Review, had a reporter post to Twitter to report on closing arguments in a capital murder case there in August,” he says, adding:

“And the Orange County Register is currently covering the corruption trial of a former sheriff on Twitter as OCcrimescene. Even lawyers are getting into the act of tweeting from court. Lawyer/podcaster Jersey Todd told me in a Tweet this morning that he sometimes posts to Twitter from the counsel table during trial.”

What’s interesting is 140-character tweets comprised the  actual reports.

In full.

But Twitterers have been tweeting mainstream news virtually since Day One, ie, “Saturday night’s plane crash in Denver had an interesting bit of news pop out of the unfourtunate mishap,” posted Dan Gould in Good Ideas just before Christmas.

“Mike Wilson, aka Twitter user 2drinksbehind was the first person to report on the crash via Twitter’s micro-blogging platform,”" he says.

And last year, “The May 12 earthquake in Sichuan province, China, has killed a reported 12,000 people,” said Andrew Domino in InventorSpot, adding:

“Media from around the world and rescue workers are having a difficult time reaching the victims and accurately reporting information on the damage. But there was no hesitation for those noting the exact moment the earthquake struck. Updates are available in real time from people in the middle of everything, thanks to Twitter. One mostly-English page of Tweets is here.”

Those are just two out of hundreds of thousands of similar reports.

And p2pnet has picked at least three stories, recently,  from tweets.

But you know what this means, don’t you?

The Powers That Used To Be will feel terribly threatened by all this unfettered information floating around freely,  completely out of their control, with all that implies.

Stay tuned.

Legal Blog Watch - More Twittering From the Courtroom, January 6, 2009
Good Ideas - Twitter, Reporting Live From Everywhere, December 22, 2008
InventorSpot -  Twitter Reporting On The China Earthquake, May 12, 2008

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under Cool Stuff, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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